


Remain Nameless

by GilraenDernhelm



Series: Remain Nameless [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Crack Pairings, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, extremely au, post-adwd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-17
Updated: 2014-04-17
Packaged: 2018-01-01 21:07:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 29
Words: 91,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1048572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GilraenDernhelm/pseuds/GilraenDernhelm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A new, extremely AU Arya/Jaime fic (I’m obsessed, I admit it) inspired by the Florence + the Machine song whose title it bears. The prologue: Jaime and Arya meet at the beginning of (A) Game of Thrones, when she is still a child. The story: they meet ten years later after the Targaryen conquest, when she isn’t a child anymore. Spoilers for A Feast For Crows and A Dance With Dragons. Updates every Sunday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Author note

The chronology described in this story, particularly the ten year gap between prologue and story, will not add up with the chronology of the books.

 

* * *

 Prologue

The woods were dark and sighing, but fiery and alive with torches; and the voices of the search party as they called out:

‘Arya!’

Jaime walked further and further away from them, calling them cretins under his breath. If they were all clustered together in the same place and shouting ‘Arya’ at the tops of their lungs without getting a response, then shouldn’t they spread out slightly? Split up?

Ned bloody Stark. Jaime doubted he’d do well as Hand of the King if he couldn’t even organise a search properly.

Nevertheless, the incompetence of it suited him. It meant that he would be alone if he found her. When he found her.

 _What is it about the Starks_? he thought, _I would never have dreamed of murdering a child before this bloody trip, let alone two._

The thought of Cersei made him shrug.

_There’s always a first time._

* * *

 

‘You can come in now.’

Cersei’s voice had been so soft after the hours of screaming, arguing and smashing wine glasses that Jaime had barely heard her. But he had known that she was calling him, because she was him and he was her, and when he had pushed open the door and entered the room, he had walked across the threshold into chaos. A broken inkwell had been drip-drip-dripping its contents onto the floor and turning the flagstones the colour of blood in the dark; furniture had been upended and broken and smashed; one of the windows had been cracked from where Robert had no doubt attempted to throw a chair through it; and His Grace Robert of the House Baratheon, First of His Name, King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm, had been passed out snoring, drunk, and exhausted on the carpet.

The trouble had started earlier that day, when the eldest Stark girl had come racing out of the woods, her cheeks and hair aflame, bearing the news that her sister’s wolf had tried to rip Joff’s arm off, and that the Crown prince was now lying incapacitated on a river bank, in grave danger of bleeding to death.

When a search party comprising fifty red cloaks, three Kingsguard and five maesters had returned to the inn less than an hour later; their precious, howling, shrieking cargo bearing nothing more serious than a wound that could have been sustained in an unusually boring mêlée, the story had become infinitely more embellished and dramatic; the brightly coloured threads of Joffrey’s memory (imagination?) spinning a great tapestry: a haunting story of a lonely prince by a river trying to protect his lady love…from a skinny little girl of one-and-ten and some lowlife butcher’s boy, who had beaten the prince about the head with clubs; disarmed him; thrown his sword into the river and commanded a great fearsome beast of a wolf to tear him limb from limb; only to disappear faint-heartedly into the woods and leave him there to die.

Jaime had stood biting his tongue for much of the tale (Renly Baratheon had had less success and had had to be led from the hall crying with laughter), and Jaime had watched Cersei with a combination of pity and love and disdain as she had sat there holding Joff’s hand, believing every incredible word the boy said.

The girl was still missing – gone to drink blood in her lair, no doubt – and no sooner had Ned Stark led a large party of Stark and Lannister men into the woods to search for her that Cersei and Robert had begun to argue; and the real bloodbath had started.

Cersei and Robert had screamed at each other for hours; their argument carried out in voices that could no doubt be heard from Dorne to the Wall and continuing in the same tedious bloody vein for most of the night. Cersei had demanded that Arya be punished in the old manner by having her hand struck off; Robert had called her a mad, cruel bitch; Cersei had declared that she would accept nothing less; Robert had called her a mad, cruel bitch; and so it had continued on and on into the early hours of the morning; Cersei growing angrier, Robert growing drunker; and Jaime outside their chamber door; a small part of him agreeing that losing a hand was an excessive punishment for making a fool of Joffrey; the rest of him trying to stop himself from bursting into the room and sticking a sword in Robert’s belly; particularly when the king began to throw things.

_If he lays a finger on her, I’ll kill him; king or not._

But Robert hadn’t hit her, and Jaime hadn’t killed him, and when Robert had finally passed out with the argument unresolved, Cersei had called Jaime in to the chaos; and they had both stood staring at the enormous blubbering mess on the floor; the fire lighting identical candles in their golden hair.

Jaime had smirked at her.

‘Do you want me to carry him to bed?’ he had asked.

Cersei’s lip had curled in disgust.

‘I’d prefer it if you carried me to bed,’ she had replied.

She had undone the laces of her bed robe and stepped out of it, and he had carried her to bed and fucked her. And it had been as if the days and weeks and constant refusals had never happened; as if her green eyes had not coldly flashed ‘no, not here’ on the road north, and at Winterfell, and then again on the road south after that bloody incident with bloody Bran Stark. It had been as though Jaime hadn’t hated her and loved her, hate and love both, for all that time; for her coldness and restraint and her violent green eyes and easy ability to be without him. Because her ability to be without him was a lie, and it always would be. They could not be apart. Sometimes she convinced him otherwise, as she had done for the past six weeks, but it was a lie, a lie, a lie; a lie that felt like the truth when it was happening, but a lie nonetheless; an impossibility.

‘I cannot be without you,’ Cersei had whispered, her fingers caressing his back as he fucked her, ‘you are my other half, my other –’

She had cried out as his cock had hardened further inside her, and he had been overcome by a sudden, euphoric vision of Robert waking up, and seeing, and realising, and screaming as Jaime sent the life tearing out of him; and stood over him and watched him die before returning to Cersei and fucking her with Robert’s blood still red and wet on his hands. He and Cersei could not be apart; pretending that they could be was a lie, and one that she would never have to tell again; not to him, not to anyone –

‘I _want_ –’ Cersei had moaned, clutching him, ‘I want –’

They could not be apart; she could not bear it, as he could not; he had known that she was lying to him; he knew every time it happened despite the anger and the agony it caused him. She might sometimes pretend otherwise, but she wanted _him_ ; him and no one else.

‘I want – ’

_Me and no one else._

‘– her _dead_ ,’ Cersei had finished, arching her back as she found her release.

He came. He collapsed on top of her. He had breathed with her lungs and she with his lungs, and their hearts had beaten perfectly in time, and Robert had been alive on the carpet, not dead; but for a while, they could pretend that he was.

‘Go out and find the Stark girl and _kill her_ ,’ Cersei had gasped, whispering frantically in his ear as her chest had heaved against his, ‘don’t bring me her hand, bring me her head. Kill her for me, brother, sweet brother. Kill her for me.’

And he had wanted the Stark girl dead too, because what he wanted and what Cersei wanted would always be the same; _they_ would always be the same; even when she pretended otherwise; even when she lied to him; even when her eyes told him that they could be apart, and live.

 

* * *

 

So as he stood there in the dark wood, the rest of the party far behind him now, Jaime’s blood rushed at the thought of Cersei’s skin, and how familiar it had felt, and the relief and the rapture that had come from that familiarity. But there had also been pain and worry and panic; the pain of a woman who had almost lost her son; who had almost endured that hurt; that hurt that would also have been his hurt. Nobody could be allowed to do that to them; to threaten them with that. Least of all a daughter of Eddard Stark. Stark had already taken more than was his due, both from him and from Cersei, because Jaime and Cersei were the same; and there was nothing like blood for pain and revenge; the blood of a child for the blood of a child.

The woods were very dark. He had no torch, but he could see. The trees rose up around him like giants; speaking to each other in the language of the leaves; passing their words along on the wind. And a voice came to him on that wind, a very small voice; a high one; the voice of a child.

‘You have to go,’ the voice said, ‘they’ll kill you if you stay. You need to run. Leave!’

_Found her._

As he edged forward, the earth became damp beneath his feet. There must be a spring nearby, or a stream.

A stream. Arya Stark was on her haunches next to it, small and thin and loud; and next to her was a huge, pale shape trying to lick her face. The wolf. His hands strayed to his sword and dagger.

‘Just _go!_ ’ the girl insisted, shoving the wolf away from her, ‘ _go_ , stupid, do you want to die?’

The wolf whimpered. The girl’s voice cracked. It was an audible sound; like a branch snapping in her throat; like a blade snapping during combat; like a chain breaking.

She leaned forward and put her arms around the wolf’s neck; as though it were a person rather than an animal. The wolf whimpered again, and she whimpered with it. Then she shoved the beast away again. Hard. Brutal.

‘Go,’ she commanded, tears heavy in her throat, ‘ _Go!_ ’

The wolf edged a few feet away from her, then turned again; as though unsure of what to do; as though leaving the girl were against nature.

And the girl was picking up a rock, heavy and jagged and cruel, and throwing it. The beast yelped in pain as the stone struck its muzzle, drawing blood, and the girl’s face and body were turmoil and upheaval and contradiction in an unspoken language _go stay go stay go stay_.

‘GO!’ she shouted.

The wolf went. It loped off into the trees like a shadow and did not look back. And the girl sat where she was and cried; apartness heavy in her lungs and voice; her own strength, her own loneliness, choking her.

He watched her for a long time. The night grew darker around him. She brooded, and hugged her knees, and sniffled, and Jaime looked at her head and neck, remembering Cersei’s words.

_Kill her for me, brother, sweet brother. Kill her for me._

Jaime walked slowly towards her. She looked up, and recognised him. Her gaze travelled from his face, to his hand on his sword, and back to his face again. The grief that seethed in her eyes became an angry glow, and he could tell that she knew why he was there. He saw her wanting to run, and her feet not letting her. Shock. Realisation. Inevitability.

She overcame them soon enough. She ran. He ran after her. And when he caught her, she screamed.

He expected her to scream for the wolf.  A long time had passed, but the beast couldn’t have gone far, and though she had struck it and hurt it, it would certainly return to protect her if she screamed loudly enough. She must have known that.

Instead, she screamed at him.

‘You leave Nymeria _alone_!’ she shouted, her tiny wrists twisting and her nails scratching as he restrained her with one hand and drew his sword, ‘ _you leave her_ alone!’

Both her wrists were caught in his left hand, her pulse was hysteria and frenzy beneath his fingers, and all the time she did not look at him, not even when he raised the point of the sword to her throat. She looked over her left shoulder, and over her right, and then tried to see around him, oblivious to the glowing steel danger at her throat – or uncaring.

_Seven hells. She cares more for the bloody wolf’s life than she does for her own._

The world turned quiet after that.

Perhaps it was the realisation itself. Perhaps it was the courage and the anger in her voice. Or perhaps it was the freedom that she had given the beast without a thought for herself; the freedom that she refused to take back; that she would not take back; even in the face of her own death.

Whatever it was, it made him sheathe his sword; the sound like a needle on glass. And she stared at him for a moment, and ran.

_I should follow her._

He didn’t.

He watched her small form flying away into the trees for a moment; agile as her wolf had been only minutes ago; what must have been only minutes ago; but which now felt like hours; and he scarcely had time to wonder what the fuck he was going to do when a sharp yell rang out of the darkness, and the sound of a body hitting earth. And swearing under his breath, he went after her.

She was lying on her side clutching her leg. The limb did not look broken, but her small, ugly face was screwed up in pain; her eyes delirious with it and glaring at him with an expression of profound disgust, and not a trace of fear.

‘Do your fucking worst,’ the little girl growled.

Her words should have seemed comical to him. Under any other circumstances, he would have laughed. But there was an anger in the way that she spat out the words: a viciousness that was not childlike, or affected. It was innate. Buried deep. Sleeping.

‘I’m going to help you up,’ he proposed, as though he hadn’t just tried to slit her throat.

‘Fine,’ the girl replied, her tone showing a similar willingness to forget what had just transpired.

But no sooner had he pulled her to her feet that she was off again; trying her best to run away; her leg not allowing her to; and before she had gone ten feet Jaime had caught her again; slinging her over his shoulder and beginning the journey back to the inn while she screamed and struggled like a demon; her efforts valiant, but useless. Jaime let her yell for a while. Then she started to irritate him.

‘If you don’t stop that, I’m going to clout you around the head,’ he threatened.

‘Put me down!’ she shouted.

‘You can’t walk.’

‘I _can_ walk!’

‘Liar.’

‘Murderer!’

‘Is that your idea of an insult, little girl?’

‘It’s not an insult; you tried to kill Nymeria and you tried to kill me!’

‘I most certainly did not.’

‘Yes, you _did_ , and when I tell my father about it, he’ll have you killed!’

‘I think you must have been dreaming, my lady.’

‘I was _not_ dreaming!’

‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Children often have nightmares in the woods.’

‘It wasn’t a stupid nightmare, and when I get my own sword back, I’ll chop your stupid head off!’

 _Seven hells_ , Jaime thought when they eventually reached the inn after half an hour of bickering, _she’s absolutely fucking exhausting._

He found Robert awake and still arguing with Cersei (downstairs, this time), and as Jaime unceremoniously dumped the girl onto one of the common room chairs; ignoring her disgruntled yelp of protest and stepping away from her, Robert asked him why the fuck he had been out searching instead of remaining at his post.

Jaime straightened up.

‘It was my royal sister’s command, Your Grace,’ he declared coldly; his face like stone as Cersei, her eyes like wildfire, asked him if there had been any sign of the beast during his search.

‘None, Your Grace,’ Jaime replied, ‘it seems to have disappeared.’

The little girl stared at him; anger, disbelief and shock turning her eyes black, and Jaime looked firmly back at Robert as though waiting for another instruction, determined not to observe her.

The stern and condemnatory tones of a familiar, stick-up the arse voice rang out from the corridor behind him.

‘What is the meaning of this? Why was my daughter not brought to me at once?’

‘Ser Jaime took her straight in to the king, my lord –’

The common room door burst open, and Ned Stark stormed into the place like a hurricane; his angry glare shifting from Jaime to Cersei to Robert to the girl, as though deliberating on which one he should murder first.

_It must run in the family._

Ned Stark walked quickly to where his daughter sat, and took her in his arms.

‘Are you alright?’ he demanded; affection and fear heavy in his voice.

‘I’m sorry,’ she replied, embracing him with admirable composure, ‘I’m sorry; things just –’

Stark kissed her forehead and held her close and looked emotionlessly at Jaime.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

Jaime snorted, and waited; waited for the child to open her mouth and accuse him.

The girl looked at him, and said nothing.

_Scared, probably. She must be scared I’ll try it again._

Her eyes were the colour of rain and fog, and her voice was the texture of iron.

‘Thank you, Ser Jaime,’ she said flatly, ‘I hope to repay your kindness someday.’

As Jaime excused himself and walked away, he almost laughed out loud at the child’s blatant and pathetic attempt to be sinister.

 _How does she plan on ‘repaying my kindness someday?’_ he thought, _sending me an angry letter? Trying to stab me with a knitting needle?_

He put it out of his mind immediately; as he did with all insignificant things. For the time being, there was Cersei to worry about.

Cersei, and the things he did for love.


	2. Chapter 2

_10 years later, on the Narrow Sea_

* * *

 

The sea was quiet and calm as blue porcelain that morning; stretching out to a shimmering horizon that only seemed to grow more crimson as the sun peeped higher above the clouds. It was a welcome respite from the previous two days of storms, lashing rain and sitting trapped below deck drinking too much, but when Tyrion read the contents of the raven scroll, he was seized by a sudden fit of nausea and vomited over the side anyway. He did not know if this reaction stemmed from excessive drinking, or from what he had just read.

They had been in Braavos for the better part of a year; holed up in negotiations with the Iron Bank from sunup to sundown; and the constant process of listening to some verbose Braavosi rattle off a list of what were no doubt demands, listening to Arya as she interpreted the list of what were indeed demands, refusing every one of the demands and watching the verbose Braavosi’s face as Arya _told_ him of the refusal of said demands, had been more exhausting than he could ever have imagined, and had required the consumption of more prodigious amounts of alcohol than ever before in the name of staying sane.

So it couldn’t possibly be the wine. He only wished he could tell that to the crew-members who were hugging their sides, throwing their heads back and laughing their cretinous Braavosi heads off at the sight of him.

An abrupt scattering of both crew-members and laughter announced Arya’s appearance on deck, and Tyrion almost began to laugh himself at the (admittedly foggy) memory of the sailors’ initial and very different behaviour towards her on the day that they had first boarded the ship. Despite Tyrion and Arya’s known status as diplomats from the Dragon King and Queen of Westeros who were to be afforded every courtesy, Lady Stark’s arrival on board had been greeted with a great deal of whistling, catcalling and lewd comments in colloquial Braavosi that Tyrion had only understood because of the brothels that he had frequented during their stay. Arya, her face blank and her eyes burning, had tossed her long dark hair over her shoulder and had slowly approached the captain, who had performed a cursory examination of her breasts before asking her if she wanted to fuck.

‘ _Valar morghulis,_ ’ Arya had replied, handing him an iron coin.

The colour had drained from the fool’s face with satisfying rapidity.

‘ _Valar – valar dohaeris_ ,’ he had responded in a trembling voice, before staring at his boots, saying his prayers and clearly expecting her to impale him on the nearest sharp object.

Arya had stepped away from the captain as though he mattered less than the dirt beneath her boots; they had gotten underway with a speed that Tyrion wouldn’t have believed possible; the news had spread like wildfire that they had a Faceless Man on board; and both travellers had been given a wide berth after that by all but the bravest and the most stupid.

_Except, of course, when the dwarf decides to commit the shocking indiscretion of vomiting over the side without his pet horror-of-all-horrors holding his hand while he does it._

Arya, dressed for the day in sword, dagger and her habitual Kingsguard leathers, ignored the fleeing sailors completely and came to stand next to him with her back to the sea; taking in his condition with a withered eye. Tyrion glared at her. She might be a judgmental hag, but he could not deny that she was glorious: beautiful, utterly deadly and only one-and-twenty to boot.  He’d been tempted to try fucking her once or twice, but he had no doubt that she’d kill him if he tried. She’d probably tell Dany too, for that matter, and then he’d be genuinely fucked.

The thought made him vomit again.

‘The captain says we should reach King’s Landing today, if the weather holds,’ Arya remarked breezily.

Tyrion, still vomiting, said nothing.

‘I told you you shouldn’t have had the Arbour gold.’

‘Do shut up, Lady Stark.’

‘As my lord commands.’

Tyrion straightened up and wiped his mouth; craning his neck as he looked up at her.

‘Any news?’ Arya asked.

‘A raven from King Aegon,’ Tyrion told her.

‘What does he want?’ she asked calmly; her face darkening despite her tone.

Tyrion turned and threw the crumpled raven scroll into the sea; smiling with disproportionate satisfaction as he watched the waves swallow it up.

‘He’s too late,’ Tyrion remarked, ‘so it doesn’t really matter. But His Grace asks us to stay in Braavos for another three months.’

‘What reason did His Grace give?’ Arya enquired, as serenely as though she didn’t give a fourpenny fuck.

Tyrion shrugged.

‘Something to do with winning over the Sea Lord as well as the Iron Bank.’

‘Contemptible.’

‘Annoying.’

‘Don’t be coy. You know perfectly well he only suggested it to keep you and Her Grace apart.’

Anger, impatience and truth boiled fiercely in the pit of Tyrion’s stomach.

‘There is _nothing_ between me and Daenerys,’ he seethed, ‘not anymore. And I’d be obliged if you’d remember it.’

Arya rolled her eyes at him.

‘When can we just _kill_ the lying son of a bitch?’ she ventured, ‘even if it’s merely for the sake of getting the two of you to stop moping?’

‘Daenerys will not risk a regicide so early in their reign; even one that makes it look like he died in his sleep,’ Tyrion replied, irritated by her tone, ‘it will do nothing but restore the anarchy of the war years. The Targaryen dynasty must be adequately re-established before sweet King Aegon meets with a tragic accident.’

‘Or Her Grace could spare herself a lot of time and trouble by telling every lord in the kingdoms the truth about him.’

‘ _She has no proof._ Unless your masters are willing to furnish us with the proof they say they have.’

‘Dream on, Tyrion.’

‘I rest my case. She can hardly accuse Aegon of being false, and then present ‘he doesn’t feel right’ as proof. That wouldn’t stand up at dinner, leave alone in court. _’_

It was true that Daenerys had never had conclusive proof of Aegon’s falseness; though she had known of it long before the Faceless Men had sent Arya to her at Meereen. An instinct, she had called it, a stirring of fire and blood with a loneliness about it that the knowledge of Aegon’s existence had done nothing to assuage. Then one day, a traveller had arrived at the palace gates like a wraith from another world; presenting herself to the Unsullied on duty under the banner of the House of Black and White, and telling them, in impeccable High Valyrian, that she respectfully begged audience with ‘ _Daenerys Jelmāzmo hen Targārio Lentrot’_.

Grey Worm had been more agitated than Tyrion had ever seen him and had raised stringent objections to the traveller’s being allowed into so much as the palace gatehouse, let alone into the throne room. Ser Barristan had agreed with him, though with rather more composure; insisting that whatever this Faceless Man had to say for herself was not worth the risk of admitting such a person to Her Grace’s presence. Tyrion had told both of them not to be ridiculous. If the Faceless Men had wanted to kill the queen, they certainly wouldn’t have been so foolish as to send their man in through the front gate.

Daenerys had agreed with him:

‘I am not afraid of men with many faces.’

_Then you’re a fool, my love. I would never have thought._

But when the traveller had entered the throne room, she had only had one face, and a command of the Common Tongue that could not be taught; and Tyrion had stared at her for a long moment, before turning to Ser Barristan for confirmation of what he already knew.

A decade had passed since Arya Stark’s disappearance. A girl had already been passed off as her once before; sent off to Roose Bolton to be tortured by his idiot son. Anyone with the right colouring might attempt it – the right colouring, and the right inducement. But this was more than just a matter of colouring. The traveller that stood before them had the Stark look; the jaw, the eyes, the innate, inimitable gravity of expression; and unless Lord Stark had been so foolish as to father another bastard after the silent hell his wife had given him for Jon Snow…unlikely…

Ser Barristan had stared straight back at Tyrion without saying a word; as pale and disturbed as a man who had seen a ghost.

‘You are welcome to Meereen, my…lady,’ Daenerys had greeted, unsure of the correct mode of address for speaking to Faceless Men.

_I should look it up._

‘Thank you, Your Grace,’ the traveller had replied, bowing.

‘What business brings you to Meereen?’ Daenerys had continued cautiously.

The traveller had fixed her eyes on the queen.

‘My masters, the elders of the Faceless Men of Braavos,’ the traveller had responded, her grey eyes hard and illegible, ‘send the Dragon Queen a gift for her Queensguard; a sign of goodwill and support for her cause: the gift of she that was Arya of the House Stark.’

Daenerys had stared at her with all the politeness that her bewilderment would allow her.

‘The Faceless Men have sent me – she that _was_ Arya of the House Stark?’ Dany had asked, the mere pronouncement of the word ‘Stark’ bringing a hint of angry colour to her cheek,  ‘who are you, then?’

‘No one, Your Grace.’

 

* * *

 

Daenerys, Tyrion and Ser Barristan had deliberated overnight in the queen’s solar. Dany had been reluctant, uncertain and utterly overwhelmed; a past that she had not lived, but that she felt acutely every day of her life, tracing circles of darkness in her violet eyes.

The girl’s father had been the Usurper’s greatest friend. How could she trust her?

Tyrion had smiled grimly at her constant, incurable insistence on trusting people, before pointing out that in himself and in Ser Barristan, she had in her service two people who could arguably be called the Usurper’s chief protector and the son of the Usurper’s chief ally.

‘That’s different,’ Dany had insisted.

‘Is it?’ Tyrion had replied, ‘how?’

Dany had pushed out her chair and had begun to pace before the window, signalling to them to remain in their seats when they rose with her. Her hair had been the colour of moonlight.

‘I am not insensible of the honour afforded me by the support of the Faceless Men,’ Dany had said, ‘and I am certainly not eager to offend them, but I must confess that I fear for the girl. I fear that she is being used for some political advantage.’

‘ _Of course_ she’s being used for political advantage!’ Tyrion had exclaimed, trying hard not to laugh, ‘there is no organisation _more_ political than the Faceless Men. They are not like the Night’s Watch; insisting left, right and center that they take no part. It is impossible to charge millions of dragons over hundreds of years for murdering people without being political in some way. The very fact that the girl has been permitted to present herself under her true name – more or less – is proof that politics play some role, if not the only role, in their decision to send her here. And the support of the Faceless Men, well; let’s just say that having one on the Queensguard is likely to make our enemies shit themselves. It will strike fear into their hearts and make them run for their lives.’

He had meant the expression to be a joke, but Ser Barristan had naturally insisted on taking him seriously:

‘It will do nothing of the kind if the girl strikes a dagger into Her Grace’s heart at the first opportunity,’ the old knight had said.

‘If they wanted her dead, she’d be dead already,’ Tyrion had repeated in exasperation as Ser Barristan glared down his nose at him.

‘You have not considered the consequences of your being wrong, Lord Tyrion.’

‘I am hardly ever wrong.’

‘Such modesty!’

‘I am known for my modesty. It is proportionate to my height.’

‘Be quiet, Tyrion!’ Daenerys had interrupted.

‘As Your Grace commands.’

Daenerys had taken her seat once again.

‘It will certainly make a great quantity of people very uncomfortable,’ she had said, ‘and it will assure the loyalty of the North and the Vale when the time comes. Lady Arya’s sister rules in both, does she not?’

‘In the Stormlands too, before Aegon landed,’ Tyrion had replied, ‘and yes, she holds the Vale and the North, but that in no way guarantees us her support. Let us not forget that Lady Sansa is a she-wolf of note, and possesses a remarkable ability to make her husbands die in their sleep when she grows tired of them. The woman is – what’s the word?’

‘Unpredictable?’

‘Very. It is wiser to assume nothing where she is concerned.’

Daenerys had fallen silent for a moment, clearly pondering if Lady Sansa was to be cherished or feared, before looking across the table at Ser Barristan; who had served both her father and the Usurper, and whom she trusted in spite of the fact.

Tyrion would have preferred her to have no trust altogether. But ‘trust in spite of the fact’; her own peculiar kind of trust…it was the worst sort of trust that existed. Or perhaps it was the best.

‘What is your opinion, Ser Barristan?’ Dany had asked.

‘She is a _woman,_ Your Grace,’ Ser Barristan had promptly responded, ‘and I like her not.’

Daenerys had smiled ironically; her face the very picture of delight.

‘Do you fear distraction, Ser Barristan?’

‘No, Your Grace. But I am only one man among many. A woman on the Queensguard will cause nothing but division, strife and mischief, both here and when we return to Westeros. Her present and future brothers will be distracted by her presence, and the lords of Westeros will not love you for such a break with tradition.’

‘No,’ Daenerys had smiled, ‘but their wives might.’

When there had been nothing more to say on the subject, Ser Barristan had left them alone, and Dany had moved from her seat at the head of the council table to take the one next to Tyrion’s. He had taken her hand almost automatically.

‘I think I’ll accept her,’ Dany had said; winding her fingers through his, ‘I would be foolish not to. And as you say; if she wanted to kill me, she would have done it by now.’

‘You’re right to accept her,’ Tyrion had replied; his blood like wine in his veins, ‘though it’s likely to send your entire household into collective apoplexy.’

‘They’ll get used to it,’ Dany had replied, ‘people will get used to anything.’

‘It’s true.’

And he had thought of the night that Father had died; how heavy the crossbow had been in his hands and how lurid the smell of excrement in his nostrils; and the old man’s eyes had been pale and unsettling, even in death; his fingers convulsing and grasping at the air just as Tysha’s had when the silver had sung and weighed them down and turned her to iron and blood; though now she was only blood…

Dany’s fingers had been cool on his face as she had kissed him and whispered to him to come back; and with her arms around him, and her heart so warm he could feel the heat of it on her lips, he had come back; as he always did; as she had always helped him to.

Daenerys had summoned the girl to her private chambers the next morning, and had spoken to her with an uncertain but regal blend of both kindness and severity while Tyrion and Ser Barristan had looked on; the former with interest, the latter with caution and disapproval.

‘I will have no person in my service who answers to the name of ‘No one,” Dany had declared, ‘if you are to remain with us, then you must bear your former name.’

It had taken the girl some time to understand what was being asked of her. When the realisation had finally dawned, her face had changed completely; settling into a strange expression that Tyrion had never seen on the face of any human being before: an enigmatic, almost undefinable mix of amusement, fear… and pity; the sort of pity that one felt for innocence, and childhood.

‘My former name, Your Grace?’ she had repeated.

‘Yes,’ Daenerys had insisted, her voice bearing the sweetness of liberator and mother both, of _Mhysa_ , ‘your name is Arya, of the House Stark.’

‘I am no longer Arya of the House Stark, Your Grace.’

‘Nevertheless, that is what you will be called, and that is who you will be. You will remember your name and you will remember who you are. Else I will not have you in my service.’

‘This is a difficult command, Your Grace.’

Daenerys’ nostrils had flared at that.

‘You have not yet begun your duties and _already_ you disobey me?’ she had demanded, ‘do the Faceless Men mean to _insult_ me with your presence?’

‘No, Your Grace,’ the girl had replied, entirely unaffected by the queen’s calculated outburst, ‘my presence is a gesture of respect and fidelity.’

‘Excellent. Then we agree.’

Fear had risen in the girl’s eyes, then – but it hadn’t been fear of Daenerys.

_Fear of her masters, perhaps? Fear of herself?_

Tyrion’s eyes had fallen on the girl’s hair, then. It was very long. Almost down to her waist. Exactly the way that her mother had worn it.

_It’s a coincidence. Many women have long hair._

‘We agree, Your Grace,’ the girl had said eventually, and Tyrion’s suspicions had been aroused once again.

_That was too easy. That was far too easy._

But Daenerys had accepted Arya into her service with no such reservations; the girl had been instructed to report to Ser Barristan for her duties and to the palace armourers for her white plate; her first watch over the queen had been quiet, unremarkable and entirely free of any of the mysterious deaths that most of the household had expected; but when Tyrion had seen Dany that night for their customary interview after supper, he had found her quiet, pale and crushed by the murder of a hope that she had never been conscious of having at all.

‘The Aegon Targaryen in Westeros is no Targaryen at all,’ Dany had murmured, her voice like ashes, ‘the Faceless Men have proof, but claim that they cannot give it to me without “covering all the world in shadow.”

‘How do you know this?’ Tyrion had asked.

‘From Arya,’ Dany had replied; her breathing fragile and broken, ‘she told me the moment we were left alone.’

Tyrion had padded softly across the room to where she sat; trying not to show his surprise at her reaction.

‘Dany, you have known of Aegon’s falseness for years,’ he had said, gently laying a hand on her shoulder, ‘you have told me so, many times.’

‘Yes,’ Dany had murmured, ‘of course I have.’

Tyrion had stood awkwardly for a moment, trying to think of something comforting to say.

‘The Faceless men could be lying,’ he had suggested unconvincingly.

Daenerys had looked at him, her eyes bright with tears.

‘Do _you_ think they’re lying?’

His silence had been all the reply that was needed.

 

* * *

 

The news of Aegon’s falseness had been the inducement that Daenerys had needed to commence taking back what was hers; and in the months that had followed, she had devoted herself to the planning of two great conquests that at times seemed to have equal importance in her estimation: the conquest of Westeros, and the conquest of Arya Stark’s namelessness. Tyrion had dedicated himself to the first and had steered well clear of the second; thinking it unnecessary, dangerous, absurd and doomed to fail.

 _You can’t save everyone, my love,_ he had thought.

That certainly hadn’t stopped Dany from trying.

Arya’s initial reaction to the command that she reassume an identity that had been stringently trained out of her for almost a decade had led Dany to conclude that despite the fact that the girl had sworn to obey her, she could not (and would not, most likely) attempt to obey her sovereign’s command without help. Daenerys had therefore begun to spend time that could very ill be spared in ceaselessly interrogating the girl about her life: her memories, her family, her experiences and her time with the Faceless Men.

These attempts at – was ‘humanisation’ the right word? – had been disastrous, and had at first been met with a stone wall of sullen staring, gracious evasion and constant repetitions of the phrase ‘I’m afraid I don’t remember, Your Grace.’ Dany’s desperation to get the girl to say something – anything – had soon transformed her questioning into deliberate, premeditated provocation, and it had not been very long before both women had grown to detest the very sight of each other; Daenerys’ fervent attempts at incitement and Arya’s equally-fervent refusals to abandon the serenity of namelessness bringing about a state of war that neither was willing to renounce for the sake of peace and quiet; and that soon bled out into further, almost nightly confrontations and pleas for reason between Tyrion and Daenerys in their part of the palace and Arya and Ser Barristan in theirs.

Tyrion would have preferred Daenerys to conduct experiments with less potential for causing headaches, or for aggravating a skilled assassin in their midst. But eventually, unbelievably, it had been an argument with Daenerys that had brought Arya Stark back.

_Well. When I say ‘brought her back…’_

Tyrion remembered the day that it had happened. It had been unseasonably hot. Arya (suffocating in her armour) and Daenerys (suffocating in her tokar) had both been rather more miserable and impatient than usual; and the latter, in a final act of desperate but callous provocation, had decided to try calling Ned Stark a coward, a fool and a traitor to the girl’s face. And anger had ripped the namelessness from Arya Stark like a blade drawing blood from a corpse.

The girl’s wrath had been terrifying. It had been silent and trembling at first; before rising to a crescendo of grief and horror and memory; and her words, and all that they expressed, had seemed for the first time to belong to her; to the rage, to the hurt, and to the love of the person that she had once been and to the person that she had become; to the girl who had learned stillness, but could never unlearn wolf blood. She had shouted that her father had been an honourable man and a kind man; that he had never been a traitor, not on the day that he died, nor on the day that he had joined Robert in his rebellion to depose the Mad King. She had said that treason melted away in the wake of such a man, until only honour was left; that her father had joined the rebellion for honour and for love and for grief; that he had helped crush the Targaryens for the same reasons; and that he had lost his head for the same reasons too: for honour and for love and for grief.

Daenerys, who had spent months aggravating the girl, had at that point decided to take genuine offence at what had, after all, been the result of her own folly; and the two women had spent hours arguing passionately and senselessly about events and wars and battles that neither of them had witnessed in the first place.

_My brother was right and your aunt was wrong. My House was right and yours was wrong. My people were honourable; your people were traitors. Your father was evil and mine was blameless._

_Is this what Westeros will be in the future?_ Tyrion had thought as he had listened to them, _is this what we will return to? Ignorance fighting ignorance with cruelty and judgment; children teaching children what their parents have told them; North hating South, South hating North; both sides ensuring that no one will ever forget?_

But as Arya and Daenerys had shouted at each other; their cheeks turning red and their voices growing tired from their efforts; a change had taken place. Daenerys had noticed first, and Arya soon afterwards, that somewhere in the midst of the inherited hatred that had burned like wildfire in their words and in their eyes; they had ceased to be the Dragon Queen and her servant who was No one. They had become Daenerys Targaryen and Arya Stark; shedding their masks and speaking as their true, unhidden selves.

Daenerys was accustomed to the transition. It happened each time she shed her tokar, or unwound the braids from her hair.

Arya was not accustomed to it. It had not happened since her childhood.

Their eyes had met. Grey and violet, ice and fire, both of them equally scalding.

‘Who are you?’ Daenerys had asked.

‘I am Arya, of the House Stark,’ the girl had spat out; her eyes like her father’s and her face pale and frightened; and for the first time since the day that they had met, Daenerys had truly believed her.

Dany had called it a victory for weeks afterwards. Tyrion had deemed that too optimistic a term. He had known precious little about the Faceless Men at the time, but he _had_ known that their training was permanent. It could not be reversed, and it could not be forgotten; and he did not believe that Daenerys had completely achieved either of those things. True, the girl _had_ seemed more… _alive_ after that afternoon; more…human…in face and voice and movement and form… less like a ghost and more like a girl…but in essentials, she had hardly charged at all; remaining as composed and tranquil as the day that she had come among them. The only truly significant change in her disposition had been a change in the _nature_ of that tranquillity. It had become pleasant rather than disturbing. Characteristic. Normal.

And there was her anger, of course. On the rare occasions that _that_ surfaced; it was sufficient to frighten entire armies into submission.

‘Who’s to say she hasn’t just… _invented_ a personality to get you to leave her alone?’ Tyrion had ventured one night.

‘I _know_ that she’s come back,’ Dany had stubbornly insisted, ‘I know it.’

‘I don’t trust her.’

‘That’s not saying much, Tyrion. You don’t trust anyone.’

‘I trust _you_.’

‘Can I have that in writing?’

Tyrion had stared at her for a long moment, and had felt a light inside him go out; falling down, down, down into the night and the dark to be submerged and drowned, without a struggle and without protest. Because in that moment, Dany had given him the means by which they would take back the Seven Kingdoms.

She had also given him the way that she would fade from him.

_Trust embodied in writing. Trust for convenience, and for conquest. Trust for necessity. And words. Words with nothing behind them, but words that will shape the world._

Not long afterwards, they had left for Westeros with a plan; a plan that Tyrion had hated and despised even though he had thought of it himself; and as their armies had unfurled Targaryen banners across land and sea while the colossal wings of the dragons spread out across the skies, _the plan_ – brilliant, efficient and cruel – had lodged like a sheet of glass between him and Dany, pulling them apart each time they looked at each other. And for almost every second of that entire thrice-damned voyage, Tyrion had tried to think of another way; knowing all the while that another way didn’t exist.

They had found Aegon-who-was-no-Targaryen fighting a war in the Stormlands, which he had conquered soon after his landing, but which were now so overrun with rebel Storm lords, Baratheon sympathisers and the ever-present Lannister armies that the myriad distractions and entertainment to be found there could very well last for years. Nevertheless, he had graciously agreed to stop fighting for a few hours to meet them (of course he had), and when the true queen had met the false king in a pavilion beneath the walls of Storm’s End, Daenerys and Aegon had sat examining each other without words for what had felt like an eternity; their faces blank and expressionless, revealing nothing. Their eyes had travelled in steady circles about each other’s faces; moving from similarity to similarity, but showing no sign of being moved by them, and when Aegon’s gaze had shifted for the tiniest particle of a second to where Arya had stood silent at Daenerys’ shoulder; Tyrion had not known if he should rejoice, or curse.

_Ser Barristan said she would be a distraction._

‘Why not leave this all behind and simply march on the capital?’ Daenerys had somewhat coolly enquired, ‘you could rot away in the Stormlands for years if you’re not careful.’

‘I have conquered these lands and I will hold them,’ Aegon had replied, the stubbornness in his voice like steel, ‘if I cannot hold them, then I will never hold King’s Landing.’

Daenerys had smiled at Aegon, then. Rather sweetly, in fact, and for a moment, Tyrion had thought that she believed in him.

But her proposal of marriage, when it came, had been regal and cold; just as Tyrion had told her that it should be; just the opposite of what she had screamed that it would be when she had thrown him out of her solar on the night he had first suggested it.

 _‘If you can ask this of me then perhaps I_ should _be marrying Aegon instead of you!’_

She had slammed the door in his face and had refused to speak to him for three days.

Aegon had sat perfectly still as Daenerys made her case; watching as her eyes glittered, and her hands moved, and her voice rose and fell as she spoke to him of marrying and of joining their two armies; of reuniting Westeros under the Targaryen banner; of restoring it to the rule of the dragons; of taking back what had been stolen from them by the Usurper and his dogs.

Aegon had pretended to be unimpressed, and Tyrion had wanted to kill him for it.

_A pity. I used to be rather fond of him._

‘What do you _want_ , Daenerys?’ Aegon had asked at the close of her discourse; his eyes sharp, intelligent, bright, and cautious.

Dany had smiled disarmingly at the familiarity of address before sitting back in her chair, calling for wine, and dismissing it as Dornish swill when it came. Tyrion had taught her about wine. He had been concerned for her tongue before it had even occurred to him to taste it himself.

‘I want the Golden Company,’ Dany had replied, ‘numbers favour my own army. Skill favours yours. You have fine men, but you do not have enough of them. I can provide the numbers you lack.’

‘You have dragons,’ Aegon had smirked.

‘I do not intend to rule over a kingdom of ashes,’ Daenerys had smirked back.

‘You may take Westeros without reducing it to ashes. Parading the dragons before the gates of every city you come to should prove more effective at inducing surrender than a year’s worth of negotiations.’

‘I would prefer not to take that chance. Somehow, somewhere, there is always some idiot trying to be a hero.’

‘I hope that heroism will regain your better opinion someday.’

‘And we were getting along so well.’

Aegon had looked at Dany for a long moment, trusting her as little as she trusted him. _Comely, and closer to her age, and tall._

‘What if I refuse?’ he had asked.

Daenerys had smiled at him.

‘You won’t, though, will you?’

Aegon had pretended to think about it; even going so far as to ask for time to consult his advisors. They had ‘consulted’ for an entire week. But in the end, he had accepted, as any sane man would have done, and when a septon had been summoned to perform the marriage, Tyrion had felt curiously empty; his own cleverness failing to provide the comfort that it usually did.

_The scheme is a good one. Marry him. Use his men. Win the throne. Kill him. It’s very simple._

_So why does it feel so fucking complicated?_

* * *

 

The ship gave a lurch; making Tyrion’s stomach churn and his head swim in protest. They had traded positions now; Arya facing the sea and Tyrion standing with his back to it, as though looking back towards Braavos and away from Westeros would stop him from remembering the conquest and what they had done; what he had done. But he did remember.

When the battles had begun, and Daenerys and Aegon had been spending most of their time arguing about when to deploy the dragons and why; the command of Tommen’s armies had fallen to Tyrion’s brother Jaime; and he had given them hell until the bitter end. The long, miserable bloodbath of a siege at King’s Landing, in which dragon warfare had only been employed on the final day, had been the first instance of it; and had gained the dragon armies nothing but the knowledge that Tommen and Cersei were not in the capital at all; and that the end of the war had somehow become its true beginning. Jaime, the gods only knew how, had managed to move Tommen and Cersei to Casterly Rock without a single spy or little bird having the slightest notion of what he had done; and when the dragon armies had finally arrived at the Rock, Jaime’s men had fought like fucking demons; like the stuff that songs should be made of.

But it hadn’t mattered, of course. Aegon had deployed all three dragons despite Daenerys’ pleas for reason; thousands of men had been burned alive; and when the keep had finally been breached, the conquerors had found both Tommen and Cersei dead in the Golden Gallery; a vial of poison clutched in the latter’s hand.

 _My sweet fucking bitch of a sister_ , Tyrion thought, _she probably called it mercy._

He still ground his teeth at the thought that he hadn’t been able to kill her himself. He still wept at the thought that they hadn’t been able to save Tommen. And he still felt madness stirring in his mind at the memory of Jaime screaming through the thirty days and nights of torture it had taken to make him swear allegiance. Tyrion had stood outside that fucking door for almost all of that time, listening in horror to the constant, interminable insistence that Jaime swear, and the constant, painfully typical response of ‘Fuck yourself, you fucking dragon spawn.’ Every day, he had demanded to speak to Jaime, and every day he had been refused, and by the time two weeks had passed, he had started to pray that they would simply put Jaime out of his misery and kill him; knowing all the while that they wouldn’t. Living lions were infinitely more useful than dead ones, even if they were maimed.

‘Let me see him and you’ll have your fucking allegiance,’ Tyrion had said, ‘ _just let me talk to him for five minutes_.’

But no matter how much he had insisted, demanded, or begged, Daenerys and Aegon had unfailingly, unflinchingly refused him; the former out of compassion, the latter out of spite.

Aegon had known by then, of course; of the unholy liaison between his wife and the deformed, depraved demon monkey. Tyrion might even have felt ashamed of himself had he thought for one second that Aegon really loved her.

All the same, Tyrion had been surprised at the speed with which he had been packed off to Braavos with Arya to commence the business of kissing the Iron Bank’s arse. Linguists, Aegon had called the pair of them; one speaking the language of money, the other speaking the language and culture of the hundred islands. Together they could not possibly fail to convince the Iron Bank that no matter what Cersei had told them, and no matter how many times she had done so, the Targaryens would see to it that the Braavosi got their gold back. They just couldn’t do so immediately.

It was that precise issue that had taken a year to resolve.

Tyrion had hated every moment of that year in Braavos. The blistering heat; the stink of the waterways after the rain; the cold beauty of the courtesans and the subsequent re-emergence of his old habits; the quality of the wine; the unaccountable aggression and humourlessness of every banker and stock broker they dealt with; the constant smell of fish; the harshness of the language; and all the problems that inevitably emerged from being clustered together at all hours of the day and night with a beautiful girl that he couldn’t stop himself from wanting to fuck. And all the while Daenerys was in his mind; the memory of her, the touch of her, the smell of her hair, the sound of her voice at night…

 _And now that I’ll finally see her again, I’m afraid_ , Tyrion thought, shuddering as the gulls shrieked overhead, _I’m staring back towards Braavos and wishing we were going there instead._

There was a shout from the crow’s nest and a tensing-up beside him, and Arya was tugging urgently on the sleeve of his jerkin; a little harder than was necessary.

‘Tyrion,’ she said, ‘we’ve arrived.’

He turned to face the sea. It was still the colour of blue porcelain. But far away in the distance was a castle above a sea of fog; and its towers were as red as blood.


	3. Chapter 3

For reasons both of practicality and of vanity, Jaime Lannister had developed a near-incurable aversion to mirrors since the day that he had sworn allegiance to the Targaryens. Looking into them reminded him that he had failed; not just himself and his family, but Westeros, and its uncounted multitudes of living and dead. Battle and torture and grief had stripped the gold from his hair, turning it almost entirely silver, and his skin had become a tapestry of scars; old and new, silver and red. His torso and back were by far the worst, and were easily hidden; and the Westerlanders that he worked with every day were far too accustomed to him to give the thin, fragile scars that marked his cheeks and forehead so much as a passing glance. But on the rare occasions that he chose (or was obliged to) appear in the capital, people stared openly at him, and every pair of eyes became a mirror.

For the past week, Queen Daenerys had had most of the court in uproar preparing for the feast that would welcome Jaime’s brother Tyrion and the Lady Arya Stark back to Westeros. Jaime hadn’t come for the feast itself; indeed he could ill afford to leave Casterly Rock at all under the circumstances, but he was eager to see Tyrion, and to witness first-hand the peace that millions of people had died for.

On the night of the feast, however, he found the great hall packed with lords and ladies from both the Northern and Southron nobilities; all of whom seemed ready to leap across the tables and kill each other at a moment’s notice. Lords walked about with their hands on their swords and ladies with daggers in their eyes; two minor scuffles involving squires, young knights and lordlings had already broken out and had been rapidly crushed; and King Aegon and Queen Daenerys, artfully oblivious to the fact, moved easily and elegantly like a single corona of silver light from one end of the hall to the other; taking care to favour each side equally with their presence.

It amused Jaime immensely that he (and everyone else, apparently) still thought in terms of ‘sides.’

 _We are meant to be one realm, after all,_ he thought, _North and South united once again under the munificence of the Dragon Dynasty, just as it was always meant to be; peace and prosperity, understanding and tolerance._

The little understanding or tolerance that remained in the hall was soon dispelled by the arrival of Lady Sansa Baratheon and her retainers; all of whom were dressed in sober Northern grey and wore no jewellery or accoutrements of any kind. Half the courtiers bowed, the other half hissed and spat, and Jaime found his lip curling in disgust as Lady Sansa smiled widely; bowed right and left; acknowledged her friends; ignored her enemies; and came to a graceful stop beside him, as though they were old friends.

‘Ser Jaime, how delightful to see you,’ she purred, curtseying deeply.

‘I wish I could say the feeling was mutual,’ Jaime replied, not returning the courtesy.

The lady smirked at him, and looked him up and down.

‘You probably don’t remember the last time I saw you,’ she ventured.

‘You’re right,’ Jaime scoffed, ‘I don’t.’

‘At the siege of Casterly Rock,’ she reminded him.

‘Ah,’ he sneered, ‘did you see me _before_ you convinced King Aegon to burn most of it to the ground, or _after_ he miraculously decided to burn Lannisport too? I’ve always thought it an odd way of expressing his displeasure that you had disobeyed his orders and sacked the place.’

Lady Sansa gave a ladylike shrug, and Jaime could not help but stare at her in disbelief. He had never in his life met a woman so unmoved by casual cruelty, or so naturally inclined to it. Apart from Cersei, of course.

_May she dance on coals in hell._

‘I cannot bring myself to regret the fate of Lannisport, Ser Jaime,’ Lady Sansa said coolly, ‘much must be sacrificed in war so that goodness might prevail. I’m sure a seasoned captain like yourself is capable of understanding that.’

‘I am,’ Jaime acknowledged bitterly, ‘I’m only curious as to what I should be the most curious about: why King Aegon felt the need to deploy all three dragons when one would have sufficed, or why he unquestionably obeyed every word that came oozing out of your mouth.’

Lady Sansa’s face darkened briefly, then reassumed its habitual insincerity.

‘I cannot claim to possess the influence that you suggest,’ she remarked, a hint of iron in her voice, ‘the king has his own mind, and it is a fine one. But Queen Daenerys was in a merciful mood on that particular day, and her mercy tends to be contagious. Mercy is not a constructive tendency in a conqueror. Aegon needed to be reminded of that – that, and the fact that it is _he_ who rules in Westeros, by right and birth and blood.’

‘Hm,’ Jaime replied, his voice dripping with innuendo, ‘I’m sure that ‘Aegon’ was only too delighted to be reminded of the fact.’

Lady Sansa gave a charming impression of appearing confused.

‘Come now,’ Jaime snorted in response, ‘you can’t say that I’m the first to mention it. And it’s your own fault entirely. If you had yielded Winterfell and the Vale with anything resembling a fight, the rumours might have been very different.’

‘Many things might have been different,’ she murmured ominously, before looking out across the hall at the friction that seemed to stretch taunt over the proceedings; threatening to snap and shower them all in a blaze of fresh blood and mangled flesh.

‘Look at you all,’ Lady Sansa said in a low, disgusted voice, ‘the South. Your opulence and your finery and your pretence. Do you wonder that one look at all of this is sufficient to make me and my men want to murder the lot of you all over again?’

Jaime ignored the question, and said nothing.

‘I had not heard that you planned to attend court at all this year,’ Lady Sansa continued.

‘I hadn’t,’ Jaime replied, ‘but I have come to see my brother Tyrion.’

‘Still at odds over that whore he married?’ she enquired pleasantly; her face twisting into a spiteful smile.

Jaime once again chose to ignore her. Lady Sansa once again pretended not to notice.

‘I myself have come to see my little sister,’ she told him, ‘I saw very little of her during the conquest, and what I did see was not very promising. I don’t know how she does it; standing dutifully outside Daenerys and Aegon’s door at all hours of the day and night pretending that the prospect of being a glorified sentry for the rest of her life is a tremendous honour for her. You must be so pleased to be rid of such nonsense.’

‘Not half as pleased as you seem to be with widowhood,’ Jaime countered, ‘it agrees with you.’

‘You are cruel, Ser,’ Lady Sansa sighed, ‘but then the gods were also cruel in their choice of both my husbands,’

‘To you?’ Jaime asked, ‘or to them?’

The lady smiled grimly.

‘Harrold was amusing for a while, and not quite a loss in bed,’ she observed, ‘but he had mutton between his ears. Stannis, on the other hand, had too much between his ears and almost nothing between his legs. He was a dreadful bore.’

‘I can’t argue with that,’ Jaime conceded, ‘but you must agree that his death was both sudden and unfortunate. Had he lived, you might have been the queen of Westeros by now.’

‘Why would I want to be the queen of Westeros, Ser Jaime?’ Lady Sansa ventured, speaking as she would to a stupid child, ‘I am already the queen of half of Westeros. The better half, thanks to my lord husbands.’

‘And which one of your late lord husbands does your son favour?’ Jaime asked, ‘Harrold, Stannis…or Lord Baelish?’

‘I pray to the gods every morning and night to bless the memory of my late lord husbands,’ Lady Sansa professed, her tone suggesting that she did no such thing, ‘I will pray that they bless Lady Brienne’s too, since we are speaking of the deficient deceased. How long is it now since the Brotherhood Without Banners decided that her head was too ugly for her body?’

‘Eight years,’ Jaime replied forcefully, hating her.

‘And you’ve never thought of marrying?’ Lady Sansa grinned, knowing it.

Jaime paused for a moment, unable to speak. The bile in his throat would not let him.

‘I cannot marry,’ he said in a low, determined voice.

Lady Sansa smirked at him.

‘Come, come, Ser Jaime, you were thrown out of the Kingsguard the moment you refused to bend your stubborn Lannister knees to the dragons,’ she tittered, ‘such devotion to an order to which you no longer belong makes you seem far more sentimental than is helpful; and after Lady Brienne, well. Anything in the world must seem thrilling in comparison.’

Jaime folded his arms with a mix of amazement, resentment and the desire to slit her stiff Stark throat.

‘You show surprisingly little respect, Lady Sansa,’ he stated, ‘for the memory of a woman who devoted her life to fulfilling the oath she made to find you.’

‘But she didn’t find me,’ Lady Sansa declared bitterly, ‘she didn’t find me and she didn’t save me. The only _saving_ of me that took place was done _by me_ , and by no one else. My own freedom was waiting for me, and I took it, regardless of any _oaths_ that I had sworn. You should do the same thing, Ser Jaime, before you become a bitter old man drowning in your own piss.’

‘I swore an oath and I will not break it,’ Jaime quietly declared, ‘not even if the King and Queen have given me permission to.’

Lady Sansa smirked mockingly at him.

‘We both know that their ‘permission’ means as little to you as the allegiance you swore them. But I imagine that lying comes naturally to you. You are a Lannister, and a Southerner. Neither recommends you in terms of honesty, or honour.’

‘Explain to me how being a Northerner, and a daughter of Eddard Stark, qualifies you to lecture me on either.’

‘Careful, Ser.’

Jaime almost spat at her feet.

‘I have spent the past year,’ he growled, ‘attempting to rebuild a city that your precious Aegon burned to the ground for no better reason than proving to the world that he was a Targaryen…and because he wanted to get his cock inside _you_ , of course. A year has passed since the siege, and we still haven’t shifted all the ash. We go slowly, a little at a time, quarter by quarter, house by house. Every day we find the corpses of men, women and children huddled together in their homes, hugging, reduced to nothing but ash. They disintegrate when you touch them. They become piles of ash on the floor. My men threw up the first few times it happened. They told me that they couldn’t bear it; that they’d sooner die than bear it. Now they work all day without stopping, and at the end of each day, they walk home covered in the ashes of what used to be human beings, entirely unaffected; as though such a violation of life and decency were the most ordinary thing in the world. So don’t you fucking tell me to be careful, _my lady_. Because being careful is the only thing that stops me from killing you where you stand.’

Lady Sansa had not backed up an inch. Her face was twisted into a grimace of bitterness and cold amusement, but no fear; and Jaime stormed away from her and ripped aside one of the balcony curtains that lined the hall; almost gasping aloud at the coolness of the night air on his face; almost growling aloud at the fact that he had chosen the wrong place to be alone.

Lady Sansa’s sister was sitting on the balustrade in front of him. She was wearing white Kingsguard leathers, and drinking a flagon of wine.

;;;;;;;;;

_Seven hells, is there no escaping the fucking Starks tonight?_

He was about to turn on his heel and storm back into the hall, knowing full well how foolish it would make him look. But the girl that he had once tried to kill was slowly lowering the flagon of wine and looking at him, and he was gripped, suddenly and immediately, by the curious feeling that he was being stripped to the bone and examined. It was both off-putting and oddly pleasant, and he felt his anger fading to quiet fascination.

She was tall for a woman, and slender, and her face resembled her father’s. She sat easily and elegantly on the narrow balustrade; her right heel resting lazily on her left knee; and the sword and dagger at her waist seemed as much a part of her body as her skin and her blood. Her eyes were beautiful, but empty; her gaze intense, but blank; and as Jaime remembered the scrawny, fiery child that had fought and run and scratched and threatened to chop his head off, he saw no trace of her. She looked utterly emotionless and unmoved, but something prevented him from concluding that her look made her so. He already knew the answer to the question, but he could not stop himself from asking it:

_What has happened to her?_

‘May I sit?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she replied.

He approached her anyway.

Lady Arya’s eyes met Jaime’s, sharply, as he walked slowly and deliberately towards her; a challenge in every stride. Her head turned slowly, like the head of a hunter as her scrutiny followed him; and by the time he had reached her side and seated himself; the piercing, calculating analytic of her initial gaze had widened, and intensified with something that would have resembled hatred had her face been marked by anything that one could call emotion.

Jaime laughed mockingly at her.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ he drawled, ‘you’re not still annoyed about your bloody wolf are you?’

Lady Arya glared at him, but did not reply.

‘ _Oh_ ,’ he continued, with equal sarcasm, ‘is it because I tried to kill you?’

‘Forgotten about my brother, have you?’ she questioned.

Jaime rolled his eyes at her.

‘Don’t be so bloody sensitive. It was _ten years ago_.’

‘I’m not being _sensitive_.’

‘Saving your presence, my lady, but you _are_ hiding at your own feast.’

‘Putting my name on it doesn’t make it mine.’

‘If that were true, then you wouldn’t have bothered to attend at all.’

‘I am here because His Grace commanded me to attend, Ser Jaime.’

‘And that angers you?’

‘It inconveniences me.’

‘Are you on duty?’

‘You know that I’m not.’

‘You’re not on duty, and he _still_ commanded you to attend?’

‘Yes.’

‘But why –’

Jaime stopped, considered, understood and laughed.

‘Ah.’

She cocked her head at him like a cat.

‘What do you mean ‘ah’?’ she demanded; her cold, systematic indifference disappearing so quickly that Jaime almost jumped in surprise.

‘I have simply come to the conclusion,’ he shrugged, successfully hiding his discomfort, ‘that certain scandalous rumours circulating about the court are about the wrong Stark sister; that is all.’

She laughed at him.

‘Don’t be absurd.’

Jaime smiled broadly.

‘A Kingsguard trying to hide from the King is in no position to lecture people on being absurd, my lady.’

‘Neither is a Kingsguard who killed one.’

‘Are we speaking of honour now, Lady Stark?’ he quipped.

‘I don’t know, are we?’ she snapped.

‘I’ve always found the subject rather tedious,’ Jaime said, pursing his lips and pretending to look to the skies for inspiration, ‘but since you insist on broaching it, I must admit that you _do_ make me wonder what your honourable lord father would have felt if he had lived, and discovered that his own blood was serving the dragon spawn that he fought so very valiantly to depose.’

‘And I in my turn wonder what the dishonourable Tywin Lannister would have felt if he had lived,’ she heatedly replied, ‘and discovered that his own blood had chosen to swear allegiance rather than fight to the death like a good Lannister.’

Jaime shrugged.

‘Disappointment, most likely. It was his favourite emotion where his children were concerned.’

Lady Arya stared hard at him; her gaze transforming; becoming weary and retreating, and for a moment, he could have sworn that she was seeing another face, and another pair of eyes in the place of his. She reached out without a trace of reluctance or embarrassment and touched his cheek; her fingers brushing his jaw; and she turned his head slowly to the side as though searching for something; though what, he couldn’t say.

She let her hand drop with startling abruptness, and promptly looked away from him.

‘I’m leaving now,’ she said blandly; not moving.

‘Are you?’ Jaime questioned, intrigued, ‘where to?’

‘The place of the Kingsguard is by the king’s side.’

‘The same king that you’ve been hiding from all evening?’

‘I haven’t been hiding from him,’ she blandly insisted, and though everything in her demeanour announced that she was telling the truth, Jaime could not bring himself to believe her. Her mask was too perfect; her speech too controlled.

So he thoughtfully drummed his fingers on the balustrade, continued to observe her, and noted with confusion that she was still making no move to rise to her feet.

‘I’ll take a wild guess, then, Lady Stark,’ Jaime said, ‘since you’re being so very communicative about whom you’re hiding from, and why.’

‘I am _not_ hiding,’ she repeated softly; life beginning to creep back into her voice.

Jaime ignored her, and continued.

‘You were King Aegon’s sworn shield for most of the Targaryen conquest. I know this because the dragons and their armies trumpeted it from the rooftops at every opportunity. You were at his back for every day of every siege; for every hour and every minute of every battle. Most likely you saved his worthless royal hide half a hundred times, and very often wished him dead yourself if it would only release you from the seemingly impossible duty of protecting the fool from himself. I’ve been a sworn shield enough times to know that it’s the most frustrating fucking thing that exists. Kings will insist on willingly throwing themselves into situations where they’re the _most_ likely to die, and if they _do_ die, they get all the glory, and the poor bastard guarding them gets all the dishonour. Now _you_ , Lady Stark – you must have done a passing good job. The King is still alive, after all. But it is in the very nature of kings to be bored, delusional and accustomed to getting what they want. In consequence, our beloved King Aegon very likely thinks that your enthusiasm in protecting him during battle translates to genuine regard; _and_ that your vows of chastity imply a _disregard_ for the existence or non-existence of your maidenhead. And so, because you’re conveniently both a Kingsguard and a woman; a protector _and_ a potential source of amusement; he’s taken to asking you to ‘protect’ him in ways that do not involve sword or lance or mace. Am I correct?’

The girl’s face was red, and furious.

‘I haven’t given in to him,’ she declared hotly.

‘I congratulate you upon your restraint,’ Jaime chuckled, delighted by her discomfort, ‘he is a handsome man.’

‘It’s not a matter of _restraint_ ,’ Lady Arya spat indignantly, ‘it’s a matter of honour.’

‘Ooh, a matter of honour!’ Jaime scoffed, ‘come now, Lady Stark, don’t be such a bore. Why not amuse yourself while you’re still young? There _are_ precedents of Kingsguard fucking royalty, though few of them ended well. I can give you a list if you wish.’

‘I don’t want a stupid list!’

“A stupid list?’ How old are you, ten?’

He grinned as her grey eyes expressed the desire to murder him.

‘I would _never_ give in to His Grace, even if he commanded me to!’ Lady Arya insisted, ‘and Ser Barristan says that he will never condone such a –’

‘Ser Barristan says what serves his own interests,’ Jaime interrupted, trying to keep the bitterness from his voice, ‘how else do you think the sanctimonious old shit has managed to serve four different kings and live?’

Lady Arya’s eyes blazed like wildfire, and Jaime chuckled to himself as he watched her fight a conscious battle with her own anger. Her breath pulsed violently in her throat, and her face was beautiful in its wrath…but her voice, when she spoke, was perfectly steady, and the rest of her body followed suit.

‘Ser Barristan doesn’t deserve your disdain, Ser Jaime.’

‘I have lived far longer than you, my lady. I’ve earned the right to disdain whom I please’

‘If you dislike him so much, then why did you spare him?’

Jaime’s confidence deflated immediately.

‘How do you know about that?’ he demanded.

‘I saw it happen,’ she said.

Jaime waited, expecting her to crow over him and call him a coward at the very worst. But she stared down at her hands for a moment, almost shyly, before looking up at him again with something that he would have called respect had he not been speaking to a Stark.

‘It was at the siege of Casterly Rock,’ she said, ‘after the walls collapsed…after the dragons came. I was charging into the breach after His Grace for what felt like the fifteenth time that morning. You were perhaps – ten feet away? It was in a narrow hallway. There was hardly any room to move at all – two men could barely walk abreast. The corpses underfoot didn’t help either, of course. You were at the far end…and Ser Barristan came at you. He moved so quickly that I thought the Faceless God had sent him, to take you to the Night Lands. But you were quicker. You chopped Ser Barristan’s sword in half like it was made of paper. The force of it knocked him to the ground like a sack of potatoes. He was winded. He was utterly helpless. You could have killed him in a dozen different ways, but you didn’t. You just left him there, and walked away from him…I’ve always wanted to ask you why.’

‘Have you?’ Jaime snapped, convinced that she was mocking him, ‘and why, may I ask, didn’t you point His Grace in my direction the moment you saw me?’

‘I wanted to kill you myself,’ Lady Arya shrugged.

Jaime laughed uproariously.

‘Really?’ he guffawed, ‘is that how they say ‘I was too shit scared’ in the North?’

‘Fuck yourself, Lannister,’ Lady Arya sighed.

‘It’s surprisingly difficult to do when you’re missing your good hand,’ Jaime sighed in return, surprised, and a little disappointed, that his words hadn’t angered her.

‘That doesn’t seem very likely,’ she continued, cocking an eyebrow at him, ‘after learning to fight left-handed, fucking left-handed must be a breeze.’

‘Not at all. The former was much easier to learn than the latter.’

Lady Arya’s gaze flickered from his face, to his stump, and back again, as though she were seeing the lie.

She did not pursue it, and he was grateful for it.

‘Why didn’t you kill Ser Barristan?’ she repeated softly.

Jaime’s first instinct was to tell her to mind her own fucking business. His second was to pay his first no mind.

‘When I was a boy,’ Jaime said, ‘we lived through our own Age of Heroes. The days of Ser Gerold Hightower and Prince Lewyn Martell; of Ser Arthur Dayne, the Sword of the Morning; of Ser Jonothon Darry and Ser Oswell Whent, and yes, of Ser Barristan fucking Selmy; the days when it didn’t matter how many coins you had in your pocket or how many times you’d fucked my sister; only what you could do with your blade and your body; the life you could create in taking life. It was its own kind of beauty; its own kind of…perfection. It was its own way – the only way – of being alive. Wearing white plate meant something, then. It was the foundation of beauty and life and perfection. It was the foundation of everything that was right. So yes, I spared Ser Barristan instead of cutting off his venerable white head, because…because he was a part of that, some part…I spared him because he is all that is left.’

The girl’s face was wonder and recognition and fear as he spoke.

‘Don’t you count yourself?’ she asked.

‘Barristan the Bold never did,’ Jaime scoffed.

She was looking intently at him now. Her eyes made him uncomfortable.

‘You don’t hate him at all,’ she said, ‘you want to be him.’

Jaime couldn’t look at her.

‘No, Lady Stark,’ he replied, ‘I don’t hate him.’

Arya smiled at him; transforming yet again, as though hers was the very face of contradiction; pale with indifference one moment and tense with anger the next; constantly saying one thing and constantly meaning another; her heartbeat constant, the rest of her erratic; like a pendulum to a clock that never stopped.

‘I’m beginning to think it a great pity that we never crossed swords during the conquest, Ser Jaime,’ she told him, ‘it would have amused me greatly.’

Jaime smiled back at her.

‘It would have pleased me to amuse you greatly before your imminent death.’

She laughed out loud, as though he had lost his mind.

‘Before _your_ imminent death, do you mean?’ she corrected.

‘That is certainly not what I mean,’ Jaime clarified breezily.

‘Are you saying you could beat me in a fair fight?’ she demanded.

‘I’m saying that I could annihilate you in a fair fight,’ Jaime responded.

‘Care to put it to the test?’

‘ _Do you have a death wish, little girl?_ ’

‘Noon tomorrow in the practice yard?’

‘No.’

‘Scared?’

‘I cannot fight women.’

She grinned impertinently at him.

‘ _Cannot?_ ’ she repeated.

‘I _will_ not,’ he growled.

He’d only ever fought one woman, Brienne, and that wasn’t going to change any time soon.

He felt his stomach lurch at the memory of what her eyes had looked like in death; frozen in horror, like they hadn’t belonged to her anymore. And they hadn’t, of course. From the moment that she had gone, they had been nothing more than a pair of staring eyes in a fucking severed head.

‘Who was she?’ Arya asked quietly.

The question was so unexpected that for a moment he was unsure whether or not she was talking to him.

‘Who was who?’ he replied in a clear voice.

‘Don’t lie,’ she replied, ‘there’s no point.’

Jaime stared at her with a mix of amazement and horror, before leaning towards her and opening his mouth with every intention of telling her to fuck both herself and the tricks the Faceless Men had taught her. It was only then that he realised that her words had had no malice in them; no mockery and no laughter. In her face he saw calm, gravity…and…was it relief?

Her hands were resting quietly on her knees; her long dark hair was like a river of night against her pale leathers; and she was regarding him with a rare sort of understanding that had no pity in it: with the silent greeting that always ushered in the unspoken, unassuming companionship between speakers of the language of loss. The loss of husbands, and wives…and lovers.

‘Who was he?’ Jaime asked.

The colour drained suddenly and alarmingly from Arya’s face, and for a moment, he thought she was going to faint.

‘Who?’ she blurted.

Jaime could not help but roll his eyes at her. Why open a door only to close it again?

Arya was staring at him with something like terror; though terror of what, he could not say; and suddenly he remembered what she had looked like as a child; remembered the way that she had ignored the blade at her throat and looked left and right and behind her and in front of her; making sure that her wolf, whose life she valued more than her own, had not returned to save her; because saving her would mean death. That part of her; that capacity for selfless love was still inside her – he could see it in her fear and her compassion – except this time, it was hurting her; because whoever the object of that love had been, he had gone to the same place that Brienne had.

Her face was wide open now, and her eyes were a labyrinth of despair.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Arya whispered, ‘excuse me.’

No sooner had she leapt to her feet to leave; no sooner had he put out a hand to retain her; that cries and screams and the sound of blades being drawn erupted out of the world behind the curtain. Arya flickered from Jaime’s side like a ghost, so quickly that he scarcely heard her move, and as she ripped the curtain back to enter the hall, the torchlight cutting like a knife, Jaime could have sworn that she left no shadow behind her.


	4. Chapter 4

The false Aegon had demanded that every person presently attending court wait upon him in the throne room of the Red Keep; and from her customary position before the stairs, the place seemed to Arya to veritably simmer with people; their brightly-coloured silks, velvets and brocades melting brilliantly into the red limestone; the grey and black austerity brought by Sansa and her Northerners swirling into the cracks between them like mortar.

More than an hour before the appointed time, when Queen Daenerys and Tyrion had been the only small council members already seated, people had already begun to flood into the throne room to await the king’s arrival; and Arya had stood at guard two feet behind the pair of them, not even trying to avoid listening to their conversation. A Faceless Man could not tell himself to stop his ears, not even when he had been commanded to un-become what he was.

‘They’re not going to be happy about this,’ Tyrion had said.

‘If you’d held your tongue and not tried to be clever, this wouldn’t even be necessary,’ Queen Daenerys had snapped.

Tyrion had shaken his head at that.

‘The strategy adopted by you and Aegon was a weak one. I told both of you as much before I left. This strife has been coming for a long time; for long before I returned to Westeros, if I have judged the situation correctly – ’

The Queen had coloured, and had not replied.  

‘– and I can assure you that if last night’s brawl had not been caused by me, it would almost certainly have been caused by somebody else. Somebody far less tactful, probably, and then we might have been in real trouble.’

‘Forgive me if I remain unimpressed by the timing of your wit, Tyrion. You should be thanking the gods that no one died.’

Tyrion had smiled at that, and his reply had been made with genuine affection.

‘Then you are forgiven, my queen.’

Queen Daenerys had continued to scold him, then, though something in her eyes seemed lighter.

Soon after this exchange, a large contingent of gold cloaks and black cloaks had entered the hall, and had positioned themselves in a thoroughly intimidating fashion, around the entire perimeter of the room. They, like the Kingsguard, were to wait for the signal from Ser Barristan, just as the king had commanded earlier that morning, and were to allow nobody to leave the hall until such time as the thing was done. Arya thought that wonderfully practical, but expected that the sight of all those guards would have the effect of making people less inclined to attend court than they would normally be, even if the king had commanded it.

The courtiers, however, had continued to flock to the hall and to chatter away regardless; their eyes consigning soldiers of the lower orders to the same status as cheap carpets beneath their feet. Only those nobles who had fought in the war seemed to show the slightest concern at the heavy military presence, and it was only when Aegon entered and took up his place on the Iron Throne that silence truly fell, and anything resembling anticipation began to truly permeate the air.

Arya took up her place at the foot of the stairs before the throne; her eyes slowly and systematically scanning the hall, before coming to rest on Jaime Lannister; the man who had looked inside her.

She glanced briefly and bitterly over her shoulder at Queen Daenerys.

 _This is all her fault_ , she thought, _this confusion and this effort and this being and not being. All her fault. All her mercy._

Being either Arya or No one thanks to Daenerys’ efforts: _that_ , she might have called mercy. Fluctuating between the two like a lunar eclipse half-frozen in the sky so that Her Grace might feel better about herself…Arya had no idea what one might call that, but as she turned away from the throne, her eyes flickered once again to the place where they should not be.

Jaime was standing in the first gallery reserved always for members of the Great Houses; his eyes bright, but bored; his presence almost violently powerful despite how he had changed, and why. Arya had never cared much for beauty, it having been impressed upon her at an early age that it was something she would never possess, but even as a little barbarian of eleven concerned with nothing but the prospect of future glory, she had (grudgingly) been forced to acknowledge that Jaime Lannister was a very handsome man (though apparently incapable of getting a haircut); tall, golden, jewel-like and almost hauntingly beautiful; like the knights in the songs that fought in battles and lived for hundreds of years. Now, his beard did little to conceal the fact that thin scars traversed his entire face like lines on a map. His hair was a tangled mop of premature silver and grey, his eyes were wide and sleepless, and he had lost a tremendous amount of weight; as though his torturers had deliberately (and vainly) set out to destroy the lightning strike and flame of what his presence did each time he walked into a room.

Arya almost snorted aloud. Using knives and instruments to torture a man was so primitive.

Jaime sensed her gaze, and met her eyes with his. She kept her face cold as stone. But there was a hurricane in her blood that her will could not quiet, and that made her chest feel too living; the hurricane that had come to her when she had seen the mirror image of her own grief inside him, after years of imagining herself to be completely alone. The rush in her blood as the realisation had gripped her had been its own kind of ecstatic, extraordinary, enthralling relief. Until the moment that he had looked as deeply into her as she had looked into him, and her relief had been replaced by terror.

It had been her masters’ solemn command that she tell no one of _it,_ and she had certainly preferred it that way…though sometimes, with Tyrion, or the queen…and last night, with Jaime, she had thought…

No. She had not thought. She did not want to think. She could not. She would purge the entire episode from her own memory if such a thing were possible; not because she was ashamed of it – she would never be ashamed of it – but because the things it did to her mind and her body were…

The threat of _it_ was everywhere, hidden in the mundane and the everyday. Her blood would freeze in her veins if she heard a voice with the same illuminations and darknesses that his had had; the same awkwardness around certain syllables; the same glorious voluptuousness around others that characterised the speech of all Lorathi who spoke the Common Tongue. Sometimes in the dark, she had felt enveloped by his voice; as though it were a thing of flesh and blood. But the worst thing of all was the way that she could no longer endure the sight of hazel eyes; a common torture; a frequent one; because all that she would see in the colour that she had once loved were Jaqen’s eyes: wide open, lightless, lifeless.

The memory of him was her weakness and her vulnerability; the one thing, _the only thing_ , that could paralyse her where she stood, and neither Arya Stark nor No one could afford to be paralysed, not even for an instant.

The fear of Jaime, and of what he had seen, had kept her awake all night; and for several hours, she had toyed with the idea of simply going to his chambers and killing him. It would be an easy execution. She had fifty different poisons in her brown leather case; half of which could easily get it done before morning.

Then her heart had slowed, and her breath had levelled, and she had realised that protection lay in the place that Queen Daenerys had wished out of existence. She would simply have to become No one, entirely and completely, if the need ever arose to speak to him again. Forgetting about Arya would be to forget the thing that he had seen inside her. Forgetting about Arya would ensure that he would never see it again.

The herald was calling for silence, the courtiers were eagerly obeying, and in her mind’s eye Arya saw Aegon sitting upright on the Iron Throne behind her; staring his lords down like the three-headed dragon that decorated his doublet; the gold of his crown glinting impressively against his silver hair; the royal brows furrowed in power and wrath.

 _There must be something wrong with me,_ Arya thought, _most women in the kingdoms would kill to have such a man inappropriately propositioning them._

‘House Targaryen did not win the Seven Kingdoms back from the line of the Usurper so that chaos and division should continue to reign – so that North and South should continue to be at each other’s throats until the end of time,’ Aegon declared, his tone formidable and his displeasure evident, ‘we won these kingdoms back to create a Golden Age the likes of which this world has never seen; a Golden Age won in the currency of peace, in which all men might be brothers. When my queen and I first began to move together across Westeros, we saw a realm so torn up by war that it resembled the carcass of a living thing. The land breathed still, and so did its people, but only barely. We undertook to bring relief, and to bring peace; to bring tolerance and understanding; and in all our dealings, to obliterate hatred, and the desire for vengeance.’

There was complete silence in the hall; expectant and discomforted.

‘We named equal numbers of Northerners and Southerners to prominent positions in government, in the name of learning to work together,’ Aegon promptly continued, ‘we did the same with relief efforts sent out to those areas worst affected by the war. We encouraged fostership between North and South so that we might learn to understand one another through our children. We welcomed this effort and this noble goal.’

Feet had begun to shuffle throughout the hall, and faces to turn red with anger, and still Aegon continued, the force of his voice growing greater, and enraged:

‘We welcomed this effort, and this _noble goal_ ,’ Aegon half-spoke, half-spat, ‘this attempt to bring peace to our land, and it was assumed that the lords and ladies of Westeros; being sensible, educated beings capable of appreciating the general undesirability of war, would undertake to welcome it too; to _listen_ to each other in the spirit of goodwill and reconciliation despite the horrors and injustices of the past; and to settle their grievances in council before the Iron Throne, as civilised human beings, rather than on some muddy field already so saturated in blood that it would hardly bear any more of it. And yet what have we found, over the past year? Northerners slaughtered in the Westerlands for no better reason than their origins; Southerners stoned to death at White Harbour for similar reasons. We have seen farms burned, women raped and men killed on both sides for the most tragic and ludicrous reasons; we have seen maesters killed for treating the wounded; we have seen half the orchards in the Reach set on fire and the defacement of almost every weirwood tree from the Red Fork to the Wall. We have not seen a sovereign realm, my lords and ladies. We have seen a realm in anarchy. And too many times in court – far too many times – I have heard ‘low birth’ blamed for this: the peasantry, the poor…even ‘ _the minor nobility,_ ’ from the more obnoxious of you. I have seen the guilty laying responsibility for these atrocities at the doors of the guilty and the innocent alike, and I answer you, my lords and ladies, that none are responsible for this but you yourselves. These are your people, and your lands, and you are answerable both for your people’s behaviour and for their welfare. This division, this _chaos_ , this willingness to draw both swords and blood in retribution for the pettiest of insults or imagined slanders, that last night saw a common brawl at _a welcoming feast_ , in the _great hall_ of the Red Keep, the seat of all power in our kingdoms – this strife, this _lunacy_ , _has to stop_. By all the gods, have you no shame at all? Have you no notion of self-control? I declare that you have made my queen and I feel quite foolish. In the past year, we have expected you _and trusted you_ to embrace goodwill and reconciliation, thinking it to be the dearest wish of all thinking and feeling human beings after a decade of bloodshed and slaughter…but last night, when we saw swords drawn _in the presence of the king and queen_ ; _fighting_ in the hall and surrounds; the threatening of ladies of gentle birth and of old men and women incapable of defending themselves; the injury of fifteen black cloaks, three Kingsguard and a half-complement of gold cloaks, _all because of some ridiculous jape uttered by an unusually verbose person, now near me_ …when my queen and I observed this last night, we realised, once and for all, that none of you can be trusted to keep the peace at court, leave alone in your own lands. We have therefore determined that we shall have to stand over you and hold your hands like children, since you have all proven to be children in mind. This realm desires peace. This realm demands peace, and by all the gods, it will have peace, one way or another. Ser Jaime Lannister and Lady Sansa Baratheon, step forward.’

The crowd was terrifyingly and deathly silent now, and remained so under the threat of Aegon’s glare as Jaime and Sansa made their way to the foot of the stairs; mutual hatred; North and South; history; glimmering like a sheet of ruddy metal between them. Aegon regally stared them down. Arya simply looked at them; Sansa, whom she no longer knew, standing directly and unseeingly in front of her; Jaime, whom she could no longer know, slightly further away; his presence making her uncomfortable.

‘Together,’ the false king said, ‘the pair of you control a more sizeable portion of my kingdom that I am comfortable with. I congratulate you on it.’

The courtiers, relieved to have something to chortle about after the stern severity of Aegon’s lengthy discourse, dutifully roared with laughter.

‘In that light,’ Aegon frostily declared, ‘I am delighted to announce that you are to be joined together as husband and wife in the sight of gods and men, in the hope that your union, and your progeny, will bridge the gap between North and South, and usher in the peace that we have craved so desperately.’

There was a brief silence; then an equally brief realisation; then pandemonium as the full implications of Aegon’s words crashed into the mind and voice of the crowd and drove it into chaos.

The colour in each high individual pane of glass seemed suddenly to become too much for it; squirming and writhing in agony, and screaming out in the voices of the undead. A wall of sound thundered in the very stones as roars of protest from every part of the hall made the slabs beneath their feet quake, and fires normally kept dead in court reignite with both spontaneity and arson. Fathers restrained sons from seeking out old enemies and attacking them where they stood; mothers held their daughters to them and tried to stop their ears, even as septas did the same with their charges. In the cacophony Arya heard pleas, threats, tears, prayers, and memories; every person that had lost his or her life during the war seeming to rise like a ghost from mass graves; sepulchres; ditches on the side of the road; rivers; oceans and vast deserts full of ashes to scream into the ears of the living and to rip their hearing from them. Scuffles began to break out, and small charges made towards the doors. Arya and her brothers turned their heads towards Ser Barristan; their hands on their weapons. He nodded grimly. And across the hall, innumerable swords were drawn from the belts and scabbards of gold cloaks, black cloaks and Kingsguard alike; murdering pandemonium and muzzling its voice.

The silence was instantaneous. Swords wedded to their bodies were like a glowing wall of knives. And Arya heard Aegon leaning back in his ugly iron chair; triumph heavy in his voice as he spoke.

‘Does anyone wish to protest?’

Arya gripped her sword too hard to wield it. She heard the still births of a thousand words in the air; a thousand utterances retracted before they became sounds.

 _Is this what peace sounds like?_ Arya thought.

Her sister was glaring upwards at the throne; her face beautiful and pale in its fury. And Ser Jaime was glaring into his own past; paying no attention to the woman beside him.

* * *

 

Since Jaime’s dismissal from the Kingsguard, he had been strictly forbidden from ever setting foot inside the white sword tower again. At the time, he had found this hugely funny in an excruciatingly bitter sort of way: ‘ _they think dismissal from a_ building _is enough to unmake a fucking Kingsguard?’ he had thought, ‘What are they going to do? Change the locks? Put a sign on the door?’_

Intriguing as the notion had been, he had never attempted to see what measures might have been put in place to keep him out. He had always imagined that they would have done _something_ : he was, after all, the madman who had led thousands of men into battle against three bloody dragons. And yet tonight, when the fingers of his left hand fastened around the door handle, the white door opened easily and noiselessly, and he felt his heart sinking at the sight of the moonlight that flooded the white rooms and turned the view of the sea silver.

 _I’m not a threat anymore,_ he realised bitterly, _I’m a fucking pawn._

_I’ve become smaller._

_I’ve waned._

Twenty years ago, nobody would have dared drag him before the Iron Throne and command him, as though he were a child, to marry, and sacrifice, and do his duty. Twenty years ago, people had still been fucking terrified of him, and the name of Lannister had still commanded respect.

Not that he hadn’t given it a reasonably good fight, under the circumstances. Lady Sansa too, for that matter. Once King Aegon had grown tired of his own theatrics, he had sent directly for the marriage contract, which was duly brought before him along with a writing table and ink, and shoved beneath their noses with the entire court still in attendance. Lady Sansa and Jaime had stood facing each other and hating each other along with the lords of both their realms; refusing to comply, refusing to listen, and refusing to do so much as speak. King Aegon had shrugged courteously in the face of their disobedience and had commanded his Kingsguard to cut both their heads off, and to bring forward the next in line to their respective titles, to be betrothed in their stead.

‘Though do try not to get blood on the marriage contract,’ Aegon had said, ‘the parchment is from Volantis.’

Jaime had taken one look at the blatant eagerness on Ser Barristan’s face, and Lady Sansa at the appalling pallour of her sister’s, and they had both acquiesced in simultaneous compliance and fury; Jaime’s signature an untidy scrawl; Lady Sansa’s tearing a hole in the paper.

The world had erupted into colourful, screeching noise around him, and he had thought of Brienne, and felt sick.

But tonight, the world around him was white and blue; the colours of familiarity, and of a glorious past that made his future seem all the more terrible.

He passed the council table and climbed the stairs to the sleeping cells; the white stones familiar beneath his feet and the darkness thick with the snores of whichever lowborns and ingrates and overconfident little tulips were not on duty tonight. But there was a light burning in the gap beneath the door of the cell that had once been his, and he knew, instinctively, that that was the one he had come here to knock on.

The door opened slowly, but immediately, and Arya blinked composedly at him with wide grey eyes; her face calm as the surface of a lake. She was dressed in plain woollen breeches and a shirt of foreign design cut rather lower than conventional Westerosi modesty dictated; and though her hair looked like she hadn’t put a comb to it in weeks, his presence did not inspire her to try to fix it.

 _A freak among women_.

‘You’re still up,’ Jaime ventured.

‘I’ve woken up,’ Arya quietly responded, ‘I’m going to the dragon pit.’

It took a moment for that to sink in.

‘The _dragon pit_?’ Jaime repeated.

‘The dragons are fed every night at the hour of the owl,’ she told him, ‘they can’t get through the night without eating.’

The conversation petered abruptly away, and the girl leaned awkwardly against the doorframe, waiting for him to speak further.

He said nothing.

‘What is it?’ Arya asked.

‘I wish to speak to you,’ Jaime replied.

‘Why?’

When he answered the question with a nonchalant shrug; she sighed deeply, stepped out of the room and pulled the door closed behind her; not looking at him.

‘You’ll have to walk down with me,’ she said, ‘I can’t stop now.’

Jaime had no desire to go within a hundred miles of those monsters again, but he wasn’t about to tell her that. So they walked down to the dragon pit in silence; every step seeming to scream at him like thousands of men, and women, and children as they slowly burned alive. The further they walked, the louder the screams became, and as Jaime’s mind and body frantically urged him to retreat rather than to go forward; he ground his teeth, cursed himself and kept walking; glancing intermittently at the girl beside him in the hope that she might give him something else to think about.

No assistance was forthcoming. Her face was grim, impenetrable and lifeless; locked in perpetual indifference.

They walked down staircase upon staircase, they passed through guarded doors and gates and arches, and when they finally reached the great doors of the dragon pit, Arya placed her hand firmly over the keyhole and stepped back as the doors rasped open with a rattle of chains and a harsh groaning of stone on stone.

The dragon pit was a dark, crude, cavernous, arena-like hole in the ground that Lord Varys had ‘discovered’ shortly after the conquest. It was possible to walk sideways for a hundred feet or more, and impossible to walk forwards for more than ten; thus providing plenty of room for running for one’s life and as little room as possible for unwittingly falling into the pit itself. It was a primitive, but very effective resting place for Queen Daenerys’ monsters while their true home, the great dome on Rhaenys’ hill that had lain ruined and vaultless and empty to the sky for centuries, was rebuilt to be greater than its predecessor had ever been. ‘Once completed,’ King Aegon had apparently declared, ‘its bronze doors will stand open again for the first time in a century, so that all the world may flock to this city and see the might of House Targaryen for themselves.’

Jaime shuddered at the thought as he approached the edge of the pit and peered into it. The dragons looked upwards at him in eerie unison, and as Arya greeted them in High Valyrian from a place beyond his vision, all three began to growl; their eyes glowing in the half dark.

‘Come away from the edge!’ Arya barked.

Jaime didn’t need to be told twice ( _why the fuck did I come here???)_ , and retreated as far back as was possible without actually leaving the room. A faint light was shining from a large, rectangular gap in the floor some five feet to the left of him, and it was in this direction that Arya moved; continuing to jabber away in High Valyrian as though the bloody beasts were human beings. As she reached the gap in the floor, her fingers touched the wall above it, and fumbled slightly in the dark before closing around a chain that was almost invisible to the naked eye. She gave it a casual pull, a shrieking racket ensued, and Jaime watched the weak light before her feet dwindle, then die completely as a stone slab bearing what looked like the entire contents of a butcher’s shop was brought up from the level below.

Arya removed a pair of thick leather gloves from her belt, donned them, and began the apparently-normal process of picking up dead animals, walking to the edge, and heaving them into the pit one by one. A cacophony of snarls, growls and blood-chilling screeches began to emerge from the pit, but still she continued to speak to the dragons and more than once seemed to be scolding them, without fear of death or retribution.

Still, she did not look at him.

‘Why does a Kingsguard get up every night to do a servant’s job?’ Jaime asked.

‘I’m good with animals,’ Arya replied; saying nothing else.

Jaime smirked, leaned back against the wall and silently watched her work as she moved back and forth, back and forth, from the stone slab to the edge of the pit; flinging, tossing and sometimes dropping an increasingly great variety of corpses, some of them very heavy, down to the dragons in their pit below. She continued her one-sided High Valyrian conversation without the slightest trace of embarrassment, and frowned, or occasionally smiled, as the more expressive-sounding of her phrases were greeted with equally expressive snorts, shrieks and purrs that could have signified anything from grumpiness to appreciation to wrath. More than once, Jaime found himself on the point of leaping forward and pulling her away from the edge, but regardless of whatever sound the dragons made, she did not seem to share his concern. Once, he might have called it bravery. Today, he called it stupidity.

_Brienne might have lived, had she only known the difference._

When she had finished, Arya removed her gloves, replaced them and sent the empty stone slab crashing back down to the level below. Only then did she favour him with her best blank stare.

‘What did you want to speak to me about?’ she asked.

‘Your sister,’ Jaime replied, in as measured a manner as he could.

‘Yes, of course,’ Arya acknowledged, nodding curtly and coming to stand in front of him, ‘my sister. I must congratulate you.’

‘Fuck your congratulations, Lady Stark,’ Jaime spat, irrationally infuriated by her tone.

‘Is there some point to this conversation,’ Arya ventured impassively, ‘or do you mean to stand here insulting me all night?’

‘I’ll stop insulting you the moment you start making sense!’ Jaime exclaimed.

_What has happened to her?_

‘It is traditional to offer congratulations upon the announcement of betrothals,’ Arya replied, ‘I thought that I _was_ making sense.’

‘So you approve of this lunacy?’

‘It’s not my place to approve or disapprove of it.’

‘You are the lady’s sister. It is usual to presume that you know her enough to approve or disapprove.’

Arya’s eyes seemed to turn inward then; as though seeing herself rather than him.

‘I know little of anything at all, save taking life,’ she murmured, her face shifting and changing as she thought of the sister that she hardly knew at all. It made Jaime think of himself, and Tyrion; his brother who had steadfastly refused to see him since his return from Braavos.

 _I should have told him the truth about the girl from the beginning,_ Jaime thought, _I should have told Father to fuck himself and stood by my brother. I was a man grown at the time. I could easily have done it._

Jaime looked at Arya again. She had remained eerily silent during his brief introspection; standing opposite him like a speechless, motionless slab of ice, and Jaime was seized by a sudden impulse to take her by the shoulders and shake some bloody life into her.

 _What is the_ matter _with the girl?_ he thought.

Then he realised that the person that he had met the previous evening – that wild-blooded, hot and cold, easily irritated and inexplicably compassionate entity – had been a rarity; a gift; something that only emerged by accident, and very rarely by will. Most of the time, she was this. A brick wall.

_No._

‘You need to marry Sansa,’ Arya said, confirming his suspicions.

When he did not reply, she looked frankly at him: cold, firm, lifeless.

‘I can see that’s not what you wanted to hear, Ser Jaime,’ she observed.

‘Can’t I be free for once in my life?’ Jaime replied, with some heat, ‘haven’t I earned it?’

‘No living creature is ever truly free, no matter what he’s ‘earned,” the girl smiled bitterly, ‘anyone who thinks otherwise, particularly at your age, is an idiot.’

‘Now you sound like my father,’ Jaime snapped.

Her jaw tightened – slightly.

‘You have no choice in this,’ Arya continued, ‘there is too much at stake. If you go back on your word now, the kingdoms will descend into anarchy, and worse. The Northerners will be relieved, but will convince themselves that they have been insulted; the South will rush to defend its honour, and we’ll all be at war before the week’s out.’

_Wake up. I want to talk to you. Please._

‘Don’t be so bloody dramatic!’ Jaime sneered, in as irritating a tone as he could muster.

‘I’d rather be dramatic than selfish,’ Arya responded, remaining aloof, ‘you ought to be ashamed of yourself.’

‘ _Ashamed of myself?_ ’ Jaime repeated in disbelief, ‘ _selfish?_ Come and see what your bitch sister’s ambition has done to my homeland and then we’ll talk about _selfish!_ ’

The girl’s lips parted. Her cheeks flushed momentarily, and for a moment, the War of Five Kings seemed to nestle ominously in every particle of her skin; threatening to explode into shards of wildfire and stone, and bring her mask crashing down.

Jaime saw the threat, and found himself holding onto it like hope.

_I want to speak to the person beneath the fall of stone and wildfire. I want to speak to the person who, without having to ask me why, will understand why I cannot do this thing. Wake up. Please._

But Arya’s mouth was slowly closing again; the threat was fleeing from her face; her eyes were dying; and she was looking at him disinterestedly and silently; as though his last words had _not_ been a grievous insult to herself and to her family; as though the Arya Stark that he had spoken to last night would not have tried to slit his throat for saying such a thing.

He reached out and touched her face in the same way that she had touched his the night before: searchingly, intimately, and without embarrassment. Her expression did not change, and neither did her eyes; the mask did not crumble and the wall did not break. But the skin beneath his fingertips was scalding hot, and he could feel the shadow of her blood as it thundered in her veins.

‘Wake up,’ he said.

She cocked an eyebrow at him.

‘I am awake.’

_And I’m a fool._

He dropped his hand. A thousand insults plunged into his mind and nestled painfully on his tongue.

And yet in the end, he said nothing; stepping back from her, turning on his heel and hating himself as he walked quickly away.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first part of this chapter was inspired by a particularly badass moment in Rome season 2: can’t remember which episode, though :-)


	5. Chapter 5

At first, Arya was much surprised by the excellence of the jousting; her decision made as she and Loras Tyrell stood fuming at Aegon and Daenerys’ side, about to scream in frustration that they were not participating themselves. But as the tournament progressed, her anger began to abate, somewhat, as she slowly realised that all the knights riding in the tourney held in celebration of her sister’s upcoming wedding, had fought in the war of conquest and had lived to tell the tale; meaning that they were either cowards, mavericks or extremely good fighters. All three qualities were sure-fire guarantees of an outstanding show, and Arya reasoned that if she was going to spend an entire day being miserable, she might as well be entertained while the proverbial storm thundered above her head.

A few short feet away from her, Sansa, the sister that she could not avoid forever, seemed to be having similar thoughts. She sat enshrined in a gown of grey brocade; all beauty and grace as her red hair shone like copper in the sun and illuminated the paleness of her cheeks with a silent internal glow. To an outsider, she might have been any bride radiant at the prospect of her wedding: she laughed and bowed her head, chattered delightedly with her ladies, clapped her hands enthusiastically at every victory, and courteously showed concern for each of the many knights injured or brought to the ground as the day progressed. She looked like a young girl living a dream.

She was an excellent actress.

The same could not be said, however, for the thousands of people, both high and lowborn, who merely a year after the end of one of the most vicious wars the kingdoms had ever seen, had turned out not to witness the bringing about of a peace that almost none of them believed in, but to see the spilling of more blood in a setting like a maiden’s dream, full of brightly-coloured pennants that snapped in the wind, gorgeously-crafted armour that flashed blindingly in the sun, and ladies in beautiful dresses with handsome lords beside them; an _illusion_ in which the spilling of blood became a worthy and desirable thing, merely because it was done politely, chivalrously, hypocritically.

Arya would have done anything to be a part of that hypocrisy, for however short a time. Competing in a tourney was something she had wanted to do since the day she had learned to ride; since she had discovered what it felt like to feel the might of a horse between her legs. But before the tiniest wisp of that dream had been allowed to come to fruition in her calm and tangled mind, she and Loras had been placed firmly on duty for the day, like naughty children being punished without reason.

‘It’s no use looking at me like that, Arya,’ Ser Barristan had said to her earlier that week, though she had not once voiced her thoughts on the matter, ‘His Grace has determined that tensions are running high enough already without a woman competing too. All these enemies congregating in the same place is causing more fighting than the city watch can deal with.’

‘Why did His Grace feel the need to punish Loras too?’ Arya had replied.

Ser Barristan had looked pointedly at her, and she had understood.

_Holding only me back would set the tongues wagging._

Arya looked to the side at Aegon. His face was pale as ivory, and his eyes were bright with monarchy. He looked back at her. And she felt nothing but anger and mild annoyance.

She remembered the first time that she had stood guard over him; on the first night spent at Storm’s End after the siege. The entire room had been black and gold with Baratheon livery and half burnt-out candlelight, and Aegon had sat alone at his desk writing letters, with Arya just opposite him at the door.

‘What is your name, my lady?’ he had asked her.

‘Arya Stark, if it please Your Grace,’ she had replied in a heavy voice.

At the mention of her family name, he had started, but he had not pursued it. He had returned to his letters as the waves had crashed and roared inhumanly outside; the eternal music of the gods’ vengeance. Arya had listened, and watched, and felt, and tried with all her might to ignore the blistering pain in her left arm where an arrow had partially penetrated the plate during battle; each steady beat of her pulse sending splinters of fire roaring agonisingly up into the wound. Then Aegon had begun to pause intermittently in his letter writing, and to cast his violet eyes up at her, and each glance had hurt worse than that accursed hole in her arm, because she had known, immediately, what that glance had meant; and her memory would not let her endure the sight of another person looking at her like that. Still, she had endured it – she had had little choice – and had looked blandly back at His Grace with nameless eyes that did not see, or feel.

As a child, Arya had never been good with sigils, or House names, or House words, preferring instead to give knights and ladies her own names: ‘the blue man,’ ‘the scowling man,’ ‘the one with the nose,’ ‘the one who shouts.’ Her skills had not improved – for a decade, she had been accustomed to assassinating people named only to her as ‘the man who sells insurance,’ ‘the man who beats his wife,’ ‘the man who sits before such-and-such a tavern at the Purple harbour,’ ‘the man who serves the Sealord.’  And today, as the tourney progressed, and Loras, bored, began to propose bets in her direction each time two new knights faced each other, she continued to do as she had always done; cataloguing their childish nicknames in her head even as her brother Kingsguard shouted out what he thought would happen to them.

‘This one will go down on the first tilt, Arya!’ Loras declared of the man with the sun-darkened skin.

‘I think not,’ Arya protested coolly, ‘he clings to his horse like nothing on earth.’

Loras rolled his eyes.

‘A hundred gold dragons?’

‘How about twenty?’

‘I’ll take it.’

And so they carried on.

She lost a lot of money. She knew how to see, but he knew how to joust, and loved it, and before too much time had passed, Loras was falling just short of bouncing on the balls of his feet with glee each time he won; his fair sister-in-arms remaining upright and disinterestedly poised despite sharing in his delight at the proceedings.

‘Arya, he’s going to fall!’

‘Why?’

‘His horse is terrified of him.’

‘Is that a bad thing?’

‘Yes!’

‘I’ve heard many other knights say the contrary.’

‘Many other knights are idiots.’

When the knight in question fell to the ground, Arya swore under her breath, even as Loras smirked like a Dothraki sacking a city, and suddenly Ser Barristan’s voice was thundering in disapproval from behind them; the wrath of the gods in his eyes.

‘Loras. Arya. You will focus your attentions on protecting your king, or I shall set about finding Kingsguard who can.’

‘Yes, Lord Commander,’ Arya and Loras mumbled, and turned back to the tourney; their hearts heavy again.

No sooner had they done so that Loras began to chuckle under his breath along with many of the nobles and commons present, and Arya followed the scent of their laughter to the right end of the lists. The man who had looked inside her, legions of blood swimming heatedly in the magnificent steel of his Lannister armour, was mounting up and accepting a lance from his squire; gripping it powerfully in his left hand as he awaited the beginning of the first tilt. His helmet covered most of his face, but Arya watched his eyes as they focussed serenely and severely on the knight opposite him; measuring and calculating and determining with the precision of a mathematician.  He seemed oblivious to the taunts of the crowd, but Arya felt them for him as her blood rose slowly and reluctantly to meet his. And sensing it, his eyes flashed to hers; a spurt of wildfire in her chest, before his opponent became his world again; his opponent, and the lance gripped firmly in his hand.

Arya took a breath as the embers of the flame slowly died, then surged again. And still the crowd hooted and mocked, and Aegon and Daenerys sat quietly on their royal behinds, making no move to stop it.

 _Apparently they’re deaf to their own folly as well as blind to it_ , Arya thought.

‘This will be a fine show!’ Loras was jeering, ‘I’ll bet you fifty dragons he falls off his horse before he so much as meets his opponent!’

‘I’ll bet you a hundred dragons he doesn’t,’ Arya graciously proposed, half-bowing to him.

‘Are you touched?’ Loras chuckled in reply, ‘he’s past forty. He’s _old._ ’

‘A hundred dragons, Loras!’ Arya half-insisted, half-snapped, sullenly folding her arms and half-choking on the uncharacteristic anger that was suddenly consuming her no one-ness and dining upon it like a pack of wolves.

Loras stared at her.

‘By all the gods, you’re _angry_ with me,’ he exclaimed with undisguised astonishment, ‘I didn’t even know it was possible for you to _be_ angry.’

‘Do we have a deal or don’t we?’ Arya drawled, ignoring him.

Loras’ expression clearly suggested a belief that she had gone mad. Nevertheless, they clapped hands at a bargain and watched intently as the first tilt began.

Ser Jaime was facing a knight in gold and blue who rode a black horse. The horse took the knight forward in a rush of slowness and speed, even as Jaime’s horse did the same, and the crowd roared out like all seven hells at once. All the world seemed to contract into the space between the two knights, and they flashed across the space between them in the dreadful, inevitable magnetism that exists between steel and blood.

The force of the first blow of Jaime’s lance sent the knight flying out of the saddle at a velocity that was almost comical. When he struck the ground, the sound of his bones shattering within his armour was like the rattle of dice in a cup, even as he lay still and childlike and choking agonisingly on the tip of the lance that was lodged like a dagger in his throat.

His blood stained the sand red. Jaime gave him a cursory glance before trotting away without comment, and once the body had been taken away; the crowd jeering as it was quietly removed from the lists, Jaime Lannister progressed to the next set, and began to carve through the tourney (and through each of his opponents) like a knife through butter; offering his adversaries up like sacrifices.

He was a painter. A painter who only used red. The crowd marvelled at his art, and screamed at it, and called his name as he grew faster and deadlier, even as his lance seemed to grow sharper and harder with every passing tilt. He killed every one of his opponents with a single stroke of his brush; laying their throats and chests and heads bare as summer snow before drenching them in the awful, mighty, beautiful colours of his House.

_He might have killed me just as easily when I was a child – and just as beautifully. And I would have known nothing of it. I would only have known the fear, the pain and the darkness, like these men that he is slaughtering now. I would not have thought of beauty. I should not think of it now._

Surely unseating his opponents was enough. Killing them was unnecessary…cruel, even. From what Arya had heard, he had jousted for most of his life – he must know how _not_ to kill just as well as he knew the opposite. But the louder the crowd screamed, the thirstier for blood he seemed to become. He spilled more of it onto the ground, and then more of it. It was horrifying to watch. It was mesmerising.

He rode them all down like a god of death; the power of his horse’s body wedded to his own: hardness and endurance and strength. His armour fit him like a second skin; like a shroud drenched in the blood-stained skins of those he sent to meet the Stranger, and his lance was an annexure of himself, as Arya was sure his sword was also; its tip a truer end to his arm than his fingertips. The final tilt, set between him and an enormous knight in green armour, ended with Jaime’s lance punching a large, bleeding hole in his opponent’s hauberk. The point of the weapon slammed straight through the knight’s body and exited on the other side; skewering him like a wild boar. The crowd bellowed out its approval, and the unfortunate knight expired just as noisily; his screams turning to moans, then to gurgles, then to whispers: a cry of pain turned softly and gruesomely into a prayer for death. And while Arya’s masters had taught her that death should be a quiet thing, a merciful thing, painless, a Gift, this was…oh seven hells, this was breath-taking.

Her senses felt raw and stricken, and her mind out of focus and shaken. Her heart was pounding hard with lifeblood rediscovered, her breath was trapped dizzyingly in a place between her chest and throat, and as Ser Jaime tore his helmet off and flung it into the dirt, his silver hair emerging from the steel, streaked with blood, she recognised the warmth and the wetness that were aching inside her, and the realisation turned her pale.

_No._

As the crowd, forgetful of their earlier disdain, continued to chant Jaime’s name, he also flung down his shield, and looked around him at the screaming crowd and applauding courtiers with the face of a lion who did not need their praise. He trotted forwards to the appointed place before the stands where King Aegon and Queen Daenerys sat silver and regal in their rich Targaryen red and black; his lance still clutched in his hand as he faced them.

King Aegon rose to his feet. The lords of Westeros rose with him.

‘You are a great warrior, Ser Jaime,’ Aegon declared, ‘and everything that your legend promises. The bards will sing songs of the feats you have achieved today, and of the role your victory has played in bringing peace to this realm.’

Jaime smirked, and bowed his head in acknowledgment, and from the king’s hand he gracefully accepted the champion’s purse, and the crown of winter roses which he was to lay in the lap of the woman that he would crown queen of love and beauty.

Tradition, courtesy and the need for peace dictated that it should be his wife-to-be, and as Jaime turned his horse rather obviously in Sansa’s direction, Arya knew, with a darkness that she assumed was relief, that since their conversation in the dead of night with the dragons growling in the pit beneath them, he had realised that there was no going back; that peace, or even the faintest possibility of it, was more important than his own desires.

The crown of winter roses dangled from the tip of Jaime’s lance like a severed head, and swayed slightly as he suddenly turned his horse about and trotted away from Sansa and back towards the king; an impish grin lighting up his scarred face. He came to a stop directly in front of Arya and Loras, and, because the former was standing upright at guard, offered the crown to her on the tip of his lance with an air of indescribable insolence.

Arya stared hard at Jaime as the crowd fell silent; silently smothering the outward manifestation of her anger as it tightened the muscles in her jaw and threw her entire body into a raging desire to draw her sword and decapitate him where he stood for such a blatant act of provocation. The king, the queen, and the lords of the North and South were all looking on in deadly and unbearable anticipation; some looking at her; some looking at Aegon; all waiting, on the edges of their seats, to see how she would respond to the insult against her sister; how she would face the threat of war that hung heavy in the air like a bloody spectre, waiting for her on the other side of whichever decision she would make.

If she accepted the crown, the North would be offended. If she declined it, the South would be offended. Both sides would rush to defend themselves. And all Seven Kingdoms would once again sink into the blood-stained comfort and familiarity of war, and once again steer clear of the uncharted waters of reconciliation.

Jaime knew this. He knew all of it, and he didn’t care; smiling at her as one would at an enemy that one had trapped in a corner.

 _I was wrong about him,_ Arya thought, _he really_ does _care for no one but himself; for nothing but his own freedom._

And yet the way that he had fought had been beautiful – so unspeakably, achingly beautiful – and in his face she could see that beauty; that beauty, and the space inside him, the missing thing, the missing thing that he had and that she had too.

 _That’s all very well;_ Arya thought, _but none of those things make the man any less of a jackass_.

She knew that she should have looked to her King to tell her what to do: to accept the crown, or to reject it, to accept war and to reject peace. She was only a servant of his will, after all, and such a decision should be his alone. But the crowd was beginning to fidget, and Jaime to look surer and surer of himself; and the King and Queen were whispering frantically together; saying nothing to her, doing nothing. And seizing Loras’ arm as she murmured something about feeling hot, Arya took a step backwards and quietly pretended to faint.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Valar morghulis, all. A sudden splurge of creativity has produced an extra chapter before Sunday. I hope you enjoy it!

 

Jaime, smiling, looked up with more curiosity than alarm as his bedchamber door crashed open to reveal his squire, terrified (and still carrying a tottering pile of his master’s armour); and Arya, furious.

‘I’m sorry, my lord,’ the squire blubbered, ‘she just – ’

‘That’s alright, boy,’ Jaime interrupted, ‘get out.’

The squire slammed the door behind him, and Jaime grinned delightedly as Arya strode into the room, walked straight up to him and shoved him in a way that would have been provocative had it not been so funny.

‘Well, look who’s come back to life!’ Jaime mocked.

‘ _You_ ,’ Arya spat; the fingers of her right hand fastening around his neck when her second shove send him careering backwards into a wall, ‘you selfish, arrogant, repulsive _arse_.’

Jaime considered decking the little shit then and there for her insolence, but found that he rather enjoyed letting her think that she had a real chance of strangling him if she tightened her grip any further. Her confidence was delightful merely by virtue of her stupidity, and seeing her as she was when completely unburdened by poisonous foreign nonsense was far more absorbing than he had ever thought it could be.

She was glaring at him with a piercing, near-paralytic hatred; her breath resembling some cold and inadequate attempt to control the wrath that pulsed visibly and powerfully through her body like heat burning at the heart of a blade; but there was a visible kind of space around her; the missing thing; the same emptiness that had weakened her the first time they had spoken, but that strengthened her now; turning her eyes to iron and making her beautiful and flame-like and absolutely fucking glorious to watch; and to Jaime’s profound shame, he found his cock stiffening in his breeches and his breath beginning to burn in his lungs.

 _Gods be good,_ he thought, _this is_ no time _to be thinking about your cock!_

‘Can I help you, Lady Stark?’ he pleasantly enquired.

‘ _What in seven fucking hells was that_?’ Arya demanded, seething.

Jaime thought back to the tourney, and grinned.

‘ _That_ was me telling the entire world to fuck off. Your fainting was an added bonus, of course. Was your boiled leather a size too small for you? Or were you overcome by my great good looks and sparkling personality?’

‘I was _pretending_ to faint, you camel’s cunt!’ Arya shouted.

‘Camel’s…what?’ Jaime laughed.

‘Do you have any _idea_ what would have happened if I had accepted or rejected that stupid crown?’

‘Nothing pleasant, I should think –’

‘You _bastard!_ ’

‘- but at least I wouldn’t have had to marry your sister.’

‘And avoiding a marriage to someone you dislike is worth another decade of war, is it?’

‘Don’t you dare start bleating about selfishness again.’

‘Is there another word for it?’

‘Yes, there’s another fucking word for it! _Decency. Loyalty._ ’

As the last word escaped his lips, Arya’s grip on his throat slackened slightly, though her rage did nothing of the kind, and Jaime suddenly felt his own anger hammering fiercely and violently in his throat as he thought of ash, and screams, and dragonfire.

‘How do I go home when this farce is over?’ he growled; the new-born ghosts of his wrath thrashing raucously against Arya’s fingers, ‘how do I return to my people, walking by the side of the woman who destroyed them; who ruined them; who turned their realm into an underworld, and say: ‘this is my lady wife’? _How do I do that? How can you compel me to do that?_ How can Aegon? How do I _endure_ the company of the woman who did that to my homeland? How do I ask the Westerlands to endure her? How do I marry her? How do I _fuck her_?’

‘ _You fuck her_ ,’ Arya snarled, her grip tightening again, ‘because thousands of people will die if you don’t!’

‘I’m afraid that’s out of the question,’ Jaime spat, ‘I’ve always had a problem with red heads.’

‘She has to marry the sire of the boy who chopped her father’s head off,’ the girl accusingly responded, ‘I’d say her problems are worse than yours.’

Jaime could scarcely believe the injustice of what he was hearing.

‘Did _I_ chop your father’s head off?’ he demanded.

‘No, but –’

‘I was your brother’s prisoner when it happened!’

‘Really? Were you also his prisoner when the Lannister armies torched the Riverlands?’

‘That was _completely_ different, you savage little – ’

‘ _How_ was it different? Was raping an entire realm acceptable because you were under orders? Or is this sudden concern for the common man something that’s come upon you late in life?’

‘ _Late in life_?’

‘Did turning my _mother’s_ homeland ‘into an underworld’ concern you when you were battering your armies against the walls of Riverrun? Did it cross your mind when Winterfell was burned to ashes, and my younger brothers with it?’

‘I had _nothing_ to do with –’

‘And what about the Red Wedding? Were you seized by a similar attack of sensitivity when your father decided to butcher anyone and everyone that I might have –’

‘The Red Wedding was Walder Frey’s work, _not_ my father’s!’

‘Is that what you tell yourself at night?’

‘Not this again –’

‘ _Not this again?_ ’

‘Arya –’

She hit him. Properly, too. Harder than any woman had ever hit him. Splinters of pain roared sorely across his cheek before settling into dull, aching, glowing coals that invaded his skin and began to colour it red.

‘Don’t call me that,’ Arya snarled, ‘ _don’t you fucking call me that._ ’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jaime snarled in return, livid at her willingness to condemn him when it suited her, ‘I forgot that the dead have no names.’

‘Fuck yourself, Lannister.’

Jaime smiled bitterly at that.

‘I might have found all of this rhetoric very touching if I had had the _slightest thing to do_ with any of the crimes that you blame me for,’ he said, ‘so far, I’ve heard you accuse me of no greater crime than being the son of Tywin Lannister. Can you really tell me that Sansa has committed no greater crime than being the daughter of Eddard Stark?’

The girl’s face fell.

‘I did not _say that_ –’

‘Can you really tell me that some fucking _peace_ that Aegon dreamed up one day, probably while sitting on his chamber pot, can really be an option after everything that has happened?’ Jaime demanded.

The girl ignored him, and returned, with a sanctimonious gravity that she could only have learned from her father, to her original point.

‘ _You almost started a war today_ ,’ Arya persisted, enunciating every syllable as though she were speaking to a halfwit, ‘if you don’t marry Sansa, _there will almost certainly be another war_. Is that what you want?’

‘If I _do_ marry Sansa, there will _definitely_ be another war,’ Jaime shot back, matching her tone, ‘is that what _you_ want?’

When she did not reply immediately; the stubbornness and the blame on her young face not abating for an instant, Jaime found that the novelty of having her fingers fastened around his throat had worn off; as had any amusement that he could have derived from listening to her preaching. He shoved her backwards with enough abruptness to distract her, but with insufficient violence to alarm her, and with a flash of doubt and fear that a sudden siren call of inevitability immediately banished, he untucked his shirt and began to unbutton the collar.

‘What – what the _fuck_ are you doing?’ Arya demanded shrilly.

He didn’t answer, and with one practised motion, pulled the garment over his head and watched as his scarred torso met the girl’s eyes; the legacy of his thirty days and nights as the guest of the Targaryens’ torture detachment. Arya’s grey eyes streamed with horror and disbelief, and travelled slowly over his bare skin like silent hands, and as she coloured, and swallowed audibly, Jaime realised, suddenly, that no one but himself, and the maester who had treated him at the beginning had seen this new half-nakedness of himself; this shell that made it seem as though the barbs and spikes of the iron throne had suddenly bent inwards, and that he, unknowingly sitting on it, had been enfolded and trapped in that ghastly embrace; the swords finding homes in his flesh and tearing carelessly out of him when they had tired of the taste of his blood.

For a moment, her seeing, and his own recklessness, paralysed him with fear. But he watched her face, even as she did not watch his, and when a sudden moisture the colour of rain began to cling to her eyelashes and to turn her cheeks to snow again, he knew that he had won.

He could not rejoice at the fact.

‘Do you still think I want a war, Lady Stark?’ he asked.

‘Turn around,’ Arya commanded softly.

Jaime turned.

He could hear fear in her footsteps, and hesitation in her body as she stopped directly behind him and paused; as though she only trusted her eyes to move. He could sense the spectre of that movement lingering vividly in the veiled space between him and her; and he gasped aloud as he felt the warmth of her breath on his skin and the sudden touch of her fingers on his shoulder blade, at the place where a red hot poker had been applied directly to the skin and had made the flesh sizzle like fat in a pan; making it seem that before that day, he had not had the slightest notion of what true pain was; not even when his hand had been taken. It had been the kind of pain that should not exist.

Jaime could hear Arya breathing in and out a symphony as her fingers moved slowly across his back; listening as his ruined skin told her mind its story, and hurting her as she witnessed its unfolding. The feeling of her skin touching his was unearthly. Even the graze of something so insignificant as a fingertip made his pulse rush and beat out, and flounder; and as he stood there, realising, he found that he didn’t care a fourpenny fuck if she knew it.

Because he could also feel her blood; he could feel its song in every tiny pinprick of her skin as it met his; and the sensation was like a secret whispered between them in a language that had no sound; only touch.

He turned around. She took a hurried step back; like she was frightened of him. He bent over and picked his shirt up again; pulling it over his head and immediately struggling to find the sleeves as his mind was overtaken by the abrupt and restless desire to cover up the fragments of himself.

Arya helped him; slapping his hand aside when he tried to stop her and making no comment as she unravelled the sleeves and let him pass his arms through them. He stared at her as she wordlessly buttoned up his collar again; her eyes fixed solidly on her own fingers, and not on the lattice of scars still visible beneath them. He smirked.

_It’s only natural. I wouldn’t want to look at me either._

When she finished, she stepped back again and thrust her hands deep into her pockets; as though hiding them from him, and from herself; fidgeting like an unruly child at lessons.

‘The Targaryens did this to you,’ she mumbled awkwardly; as though she would have preferred the statement to be a question.

That made him smile gently at her; though he didn’t know why.

‘They _did_ do this to me,’ Jaime replied, ‘and quite frankly, I don’t care. But your sister made sure that the Targaryens carved my lands up in the same way that they carved up my body. Aegon would never have deployed all three dragons if she had only kept her fucking thoughts to herself. I do not want that to happen again. I do not want a war. I just want to be left alone while I clean up the mess. And I cannot do that if I am saddled with a wife that I detest and the entire future of the kingdoms on my shoulders –’

Jaime bit his tongue and berated himself. He had told her far too much, and with far too much sincerity.

‘Then there’s the pure and simple fact that I would make Sansa a very bad husband,’ he hurriedly added; sealing the weight of his words with his habitual disdain, ‘because I don’t want to marry her. I simply don’t.’

Arya’s face was wreathed in a sudden and inexplicable sadness as she looked at him; and her words, when they came, were quiet and desolate:

 

‘Sometimes we cannot always get what we want.’


	7. Chapter 7

‘Four hours,’ Sansa hissed when Aegon entered her sitting room; the candles guttering as the door closed behind him, ‘you are _four hours late._ ’

‘I had a hysterical small council to soothe and rather a lot of damage control to do, my lady,’ Aegon told her; his voice mild and unperturbed as he crossed the room to where she sat and stooped to kiss her lips. Sansa pointedly turned her head away from him, and said nothing.

Ser Jaime’s open defiance at the tourney had angered her for more reasons than she could count; the most important among them being the humiliation that she had suffered, and her own carelessness in failing to anticipate it. Like some green girl with only a fool’s knowledge of the Game, she had grossly underestimated her opponent; taking him for a broken old man too tired and too weak to put up much of a fight; expecting, without a shadow of a doubt, that his dignity would be served up to her on a silver platter within the space of the single tilt that it would take for him to land face down in the dirt. And Aegon had not defended her when the humiliation had occurred; not even glancing in her direction as her husband-to-be had done the chivalric equivalent of telling her to fuck off.

Aegon, observing her coldness, gave a kingly shrug and seated himself opposite her as she continued to glower at him.

‘We owe much to Lady Arya’s quick thinking,’ he said, not appearing to be in any rush to improve her mood, ‘had she not decided to so conveniently drop to the floor, the gods only know what would have happened.’

‘Indeed,’ Sansa testily replied, ‘perhaps you would have been required to make a decision for once in your life.’

Aegon stiffened in his seat.

‘I must ask you to guard your tongue, my lady.’

‘I beg pardon, Your Grace.’

The king was silent. He still wore the black and red doublet that had adorned his person at the joust: the three-headed dragon of House Targaryen picked out in red and gold silk; its hooded eyes as unfeeling and as cold as the magnificent rubies that shone out in their place. The colours made him seem paler than he truly was; his hair falling to his shoulders like the lovechild of moonlight and silver. He was a fool, but at least he was a handsome one. Were he not, she might have died of boredom long ago.

‘I’m rather tired of being humiliated in your service, Your Grace,’ Sansa declared, ‘it was trying enough during the conquest, and it is no less taxing now. What will we do if Ser Jaime tries something like this again?’

‘I doubt that he will,’ Aegon sighed in exhausted reply, ‘his actions are those of a desperate, if spirited man, pretending that there is a way out for him. I just had no idea that his personality was so inclined to the dramatic.’

Sansa chuckled resentfully.

‘That’s a reproach from you,’ she coldly observed, ‘after that cheap little stunt in the throne room.’

‘Do I detect a hint of anger in your voice?’ Aegon pleasantly solicited.

‘You are the most perceptive of men,’ Sansa replied, with equal insincerity, ‘why did you neglect to tell me that the marriage announcement would contain such an element of drama as being threatened at sword point?’

‘Surprise was essential, my lady,’ the king told her, ‘I’m sure you understand.’

‘I like other people to be surprised,’ Sansa quietly snapped, ‘myself; I do not care for it.’

‘I understand, I understand,’ Aegon replied with magnanimity, ‘but notwithstanding your beauty and the greatness of your talent, my lady, Lord Varys and I agreed that had you known about the soldiers beforehand, you might have found it difficult to convey a level of astonishment great enough to place you above suspicion.’

‘And knowing about the marriage beforehand might not?’ Sansa coldly questioned, ‘you make little sense, my king.’

She remembered the moment that the gold cloaks and the black cloaks had drawn their swords in unison; the moment that had possessed her with an irrational and horribly tangible terror that Aegon and Varys had deceived her, and meant to kill her rather than proceed with their understanding. The sound that her father’s head had made as it had rolled down the steps of the Great Sept of Baelor had come to her mind; and herself as she had once been: weak, helpless, afraid. She had momentarily felt that terrible fear once more; and the knowledge of it had infuriated her later: the weakness in it, the humanity. It was a fear meant for lesser souls; not for hers; not for the soul of any person with the blood of the First Men running in their veins.

Aegon’s face was half-amusement, half-indignation as her thoughts became apparent to him.

‘Dear lady, your suspicions are mortifying.’

‘Spare me your mortification,’ Sansa retorted, ‘dealing with the charms of my husband-to-be is quite mortifying enough.’

‘Surely you take comfort in the fact that you will not have to deal with them for much longer?’ Aegon asked, as though they were debating at philosophy.

‘Not nearly as much as you do, my king,’ Sansa replied, as though they were debating at life.

Aegon’s eyes clouded questioningly at that, and Sansa found her lip curling in contempt. Dragon or falcon, stag or lion, men were all the same. Malleable. Capricious. Transparent.

‘Your anxiety to conceal your sentiments is touching, Your Grace,’ Sansa scoffed, ‘or it would be, were it for my sake rather than your own. But I’ve seen the way that you look at my little sister –’

‘Stop there,’ Aegon sharply commanded; a trace of shrillness creeping into his voice.

‘Well I _have_ seen it, even if the rest of the world remains in blissful ignorance of the fact,’ Sansa triumphantly finished; ignoring him, ‘I don’t suppose I need to remind Your Grace that it would make you the subject of a great deal of gossip and ridicule were it known that you were in love with one sister while fucking the other.’

‘Don’t be impertinent,’ Aegon replied with dragonfire in his voice, ‘we may be in the habit of exchanging certain intimacies, my lady, but that does not change the fact that you are speaking to a king.’

‘I believe that I am speaking to a man like any other, with weaknesses, like any other,’ Sansa professed, as though nothing were the matter at all, ‘but the situation, while entertaining and touchingly universal, is not without its problems. What _will_ you do if my sister falls defending her queen?’

‘I demand that you hold your tongue, woman,’ Aegon growled; the clouds in his violet eyes beginning to glow with an unholy flame that Sansa recognised all too well.

‘And if she survives,’ Sansa continued, still feigning indifference, ‘how exactly do you plan to go about getting her into your bed?’

‘ _Hold. Your. Tongue_.’Aegon snarled; the harsh enunciation of the words baring his white teeth and curling his lips back.

_Not long now._

‘Will you keep her as a paramour? Dress her in rubies beneath those fetching Kingsguard leathers?’

‘ _I’m warning you –_ ’

‘Or will you release her from the Kingsguard, lead her to the sept in chains and stick your cock in her before you even say the words?’

Aegon leapt from his seat like a quarrel launched from a crossbow; hurling himself across the room and screaming into Sansa’s face as his fingers tightened in a stranglehold around her throat.

‘ _I have commanded you to hold your tongue_   !’ he roared; spraying her with spittle and crushing her breath from her. The world flashed and churned into whiteness and light and choking, even in the seconds it took her to draw her dagger from the folds of her gown and slam it violently against Aegon’s throat.

‘ _Let_ … _go of me_ ,’ she rasped.

Aegon continued to tremble against her in wrath; his fingers cloaking her breath in a death shroud, and she pressed the steel down harder; buying her breath back with the threat of his blood, and the calling-up of his true self.

He released her throat. He did not move away from her. She could feel his body unknotting and unravelling as he clawed his way back from the storm that she had sent him to. Aegon’s eyes were pale, and terrified, and pleading for deliverance from an enemy that he refused to name, and his hands were framing her face; begging her for forgiveness; for understanding.

‘I’m sorry,’ Aegon murmured; tears of terror choking his voice, ‘Forgive me; I’m sorry; I’m so sorry.’

Sansa kissed him softly and comfortingly, and gently wound her arms around his neck; pulling him closer to her, and cradling his head against her chest.

‘It’s alright, my love,’ she whispered, smirking to herself, ‘it’s alright.’


	8. Chapter 8

A forest of tents had been set up in the heart of the Kingswood; another detail on the seemingly endless list of details in which this marriage between North and South was to have every particular of the gravity, pomp and ritual of a royal wedding short of putting crowns on the couple’s heads. The false Aegon believed that this would convince every man in the realm, from the richest lord to the lowliest serf, that this alliance between Stark and Lannister was a serious matter.

Arya did not quite see how spending five days killing things would convince the realm of anything of the kind, but she was certainly not going to complain about it. At the very moment that she had heard of the hunt (she had been practising at the quintain and pretending it was Ser Jaime’s head when the others in the yard had begun to shout about it), she had immediately torn off to Queen Daenerys to ask her permission to participate before Aegon thought to put her on duty again.

Though Arya had found the dragon queen in the clutches of one of the foul moods that inevitably took her each time she had a disagreement with Tyrion about the link between Aegon’s longevity and the instability of the political situation, Daenerys’ annoyance had turned out to work in favour of Arya’s suit rather than against it; and the queen had gladly given her consent on the condition that Arya remove Aegon’s head from his ‘boneheaded Blackfyre shoulders’ and present it to her on her return.

‘Do you really mean it, Your Grace?’ Arya had eagerly enquired.

Daenerys had smiled at that, and had affectionately touched Arya’s cheek with one tiny hand.

‘Would that I did.’

That had been disappointing, as had the later announcement that the entire week’s killing was to be confined to the area around an impractical kingdom of black and red tents because of Ser Jaime’s distaste for hunting hard across country. But neither drawback was sufficient to make Arya take back her request to participate, and Aegon, surprisingly, made no effort to change that; not even on the first morning of the hunt, when Arya, mounted and dressed in brown leather, encountered him and a small army of lords and retainers shortly after entering the woods.

‘Lady Arya,’ Aegon greeted.

‘Your Grace,’ Arya replied, making a reverence.

‘I had no idea that you were joining us,’ the king observed pleasantly, ‘do you hunt with us today?’

‘No, Your Grace,’ Arya remarked, ‘I hunt alone today. I am new to the sport, and a lowly woman to boot. I would hate to burden the gentlemen of the court with my inexperience; not to mention my general unsuitability for anything much except shutting up and having babies.’

Aegon laughed in amazement, which naturally compelled his retainers to laugh too.

‘Have I said something funny, Your Grace?’ Arya demanded; her face turning redder than the king’s preposterous crimson riding leathers.

Aegon’s face fell.

‘Not at all,’ he stammered; looking down in embarrassment, then up again as the return of his kingly confidence caused his face to break into a courteously baffled smile, ‘you have merely…there is some change in you.’

‘Is there?’ Arya asked blandly; ‘if whatever it is offends Your Grace, I will stop it at once.’

‘There is no need at all for that,’ Aegon told her, ‘you should keep to this new outspokenness. It’s most becoming.’

Arya stared at him, and only just remembered to bow her head in acknowledgment as Aegon wished her good hunting and rode off into the woods with his men. She briefly considered what he had said, decided that she did not want to think about it, and cantered off in the opposite direction; to a part of the wood that she sincerely hoped would remain idiot-free for the rest of the day.

The Kingswood reminded her of the surface of a lake during a rainstorm. The air was grey, and without sun, and if she half-closed her eyes and let that half-vision consume her, she might have believed herself in the wolfswood during the long summer; the trees above her mightier than the vault of the greatest sept, and the Northern sky above that like iron: hard and everlasting.

Her memories of the North were beginning to fade now. She had only been a child when she had left it, and a child who had not yet learnt how to see. Every time that she saw a sky of iron grey, the North would be reflected in it for fewer and fewer seconds, before the mist and the greyness would become the suffocating humidity and rain of Braavos; of the hundred islands that had been her home for far longer than the place of her people; her true people. No self-respecting Northerner – or Westerosi, for that matter – would dream of going hunting without a spear. And yet here she was, a daughter of Eddard Stark, mounted and armed with nothing but a bow, a quiver of arrows and two daggers, like some lily-livered Lyseni on a parade ground.

A crunching and crackling of leaves and earth from the depths of the trees before her chased the North from her thoughts, and she drew her bow with a rustle of nothingness; the wind that sent sound in her direction leading the absence of sound back to whatever was thrashing around in the bushes and making a spectacle of itself. It was almost disappointing; finding game so early in the day.

A wild boar piglet emerged from the undergrowth some twenty feet ahead of her; its snout, and all its attention, kept low to the ground as it tottered jauntily about in search of nuts.

As Arya slowly nocked her arrow to the drawstring, she felt something rising in her blood and her heart; something that was her, and that was not her, and that she had scarcely felt at all since the day that the queen had commanded her to become Someone; but that she would always recognise, and that she would always obey whenever she felt the beginnings of its howling within her. It was the feeling of soil, and moisture, and leaves beneath her feet. It was creating life in taking life. It was hunting in a pack with her brothers and her sisters. It was the chase. It was wolf blood.

Quick as a cat, Arya lowered her bow, and whistled.

The boar gave a hair-raising squeal of surprise and charged off into the trees as though all seven hells were at its heels; Arya spurred her horse into a gallop, and charged after it; and somewhere in a corner of her thinking self, she knew that she was being an idiot; that she should probably have waited, and stayed quiet, and killed the thrice-damned thing and gotten out of the way. But a good half of the feeling part of her didn’t care if she caught up to her prey or not, because the chase was more important than any of that.

But no boar in existence could outrun a horse, and she caught up to her prey far too soon for the chase to feel like much at all; dispatching the boar with three arrows that pierced its flesh; sending wide, crimson strips of gore splattering onto the animal’s hide like mud as it keeled over and lay still like a log rolling down a river bank. Arya dismounted, sat on her haunches beside the boar, and yanked each of her arrows out one by one; her senses prickling as more blood spilled onto the ground and the toes of her boots.

The piercing shriek and the powerful blow to her back that followed came bellowing out of nowhere, and no sooner had she rolled to face her attacker; ripping both her daggers from their sheaths at her waist, that the world capsized in a commotion of green leaves, grey sky and brute strength as she was knocked hard onto her back by an enormous sow, easily five times the size of the small boar she had killed. The beast was heavy, but far faster than its size suggested. It seemed to dance through the arc of her daggers as she tried to thrust them into its flesh; its open mouth revealing large tusks that fastened tightly around Arya’s right arm and punctured her skin like carving knives piercing a pin cushion; even as she plunged one dagger into the boar’s mouth and used the other to cut its throat; drenching her clothing in its blood and hers.

The screaming, volcanic pain that erupted in her arm as she shoved the corpse away from her almost made her retch. Tears of pain defaced her view of the wood around her, and a boiling, nauseating mist silently and brutally invaded her mind as she sat up, stripped off her doublet and found her shirt drenched in crimson blood that streamed in aching rivers and smoked gruesomely in the cold air. The wound, when she found it beneath the (miraculously intact) sleeve of her shirt, was so utterly inundated by strips of lacerated and rapidly bleeding skin that she could not find the exact place where the boar’s tusks had pierced her flesh at all, and her blood once again clouded her vision; turning her skin cold and making her tremble so badly that she was overtaken by the desire to simply fall over and go to sleep.

 _Get up_ , she told herself, _stand_ up.

Her eyes closed, and opened again, and time might have passed, or perhaps it hadn’t, and she was wandering alone in the wood without her horse; her belt knotted, with an excruciating tightness, above what she thought was the wound; and she’d somehow managed to put her doublet back on again; the clasps done up to her chin. She screwed up her eyes and tried to remember why, and when, but the pain only seemed to grow worse each time she tried; her blood turning to wine in her veins – _wine, there was a wineskin, a wineskin on my saddle, I tried to drink wine so I wouldn’t…but I didn’t_ – and she began to cast about her in panic, and she knew that she was looking in the wrong places, the ground, the trees, but she couldn’t stop herself – _where’s my quiver; my daggers_ – the trees were rearing up around her and turning to people like the pain that was rearing up inside her like a glacier and slowly killing her; she was facing her father from the top of a flight of stairs and trying to stand on one toe – _Syrio says every hurt is a lesson and every lesson makes you better…watching is not seeing, dead girl; the seeing, the true seeing, that is the true heart of swordplay… Arya child, we are done with dancing for the day…what do we say to the god of death…_

She could feel the earth beneath her hands now; one hand curling into it; the other spasming and shrieking and bellowing out in pain, and more blood coming as she continued to put her weight on it when she crawled. She closed her eyes, she could barely see, and closing her eyes seemed somehow to make it better…

‘Arya?’

She opened her eyes and looked up; her right arm propping her up; her left twitching and flailing from the pain, and the trees were disappearing, and the people and the voices who had come out of them, the tree voices.

Jaime was standing not five feet away from her with his squire; leaning against his horse and enthusiastically drinking the contents of a wineskin, which he now dropped in astonishment as he took in her appearance.

‘Seven hells, _Arya!_ ’

‘It’s not my blood, most of it,’ Arya mumbled, ‘it’s some…fucking…’

Jaime darted forward and caught her as she collapsed.

‘Don’t just stand there, boy!’ he barked at his squire, ‘take hold of her other arm!’

The pain in her body struck her blind once more as the squire hurriedly obeyed and helped his master to ease her into a sitting position; her head drooping and lolling gracelessly, and eventually coming to rest against Jaime’s chest as he shouted for wine; the leather of his doublet feeling cool against her cheek and the blood flow from the wound increasing severely and beautifully when she felt Jaime’s body encircling hers like a suit of protective flesh and blood. She felt his fingers put the wineskin to her lips and force her mouth open, and the liquid choked her as she swallowed it and took hold of the skin with her left hand and choked some more; the wine like life in her mouth and her body; clearing her mind; dulling it.

‘Let me see,’ she heard Jaime snap at her as he prised the wineskin from her hands.

A subsequent yelp of surprise from somewhere to her left told her that he’d thrown it at his squire, and the blood rushed out of her in another great wave as the fingers of Jaime’s hand began to deftly undo the clasps of her doublet.

‘Do you intend on helping me with this, boy?’ Arya heard him ask his squire.

‘My lord, I cannot –’ the boy stammered, ‘it hardly seems proper to –’

‘Oh for fuck’s sake, have you never seen a woman’s throat before?’

‘No, my lord.’

That made Arya want to laugh. But her strength was bleeding from her like water bubbling from a spring, and when Jaime slowly peeled the leather of her doublet and the sleeve of her shirt away from her skin; his hands working with a gentleness that she would not have expected from him; the sudden shock of cold air seemed to wed seamlessly to the boiling pain; making it so deep that she could hardly move. She opened her eyes.

 ‘A boar?’ Jaime asked.

‘Yes,’ Arya replied.

‘Pain?’

‘Minimal.’

‘Gods, but you’re a stubborn little idiot.’

‘Fuck yourself, Jaime.’

‘Boy!’

The squire jumped about a foot in the air as Jaime’s fingers fastened firmly around the wound.

‘Yes, my lord?’

‘Ride back to camp and fetch a maester for the Lady Arya.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Quick about it!’

The squire disappeared from Arya’s vision, and with the sound of departing horse hooves, the pain returned; a searing agony caused by nothing more than a few stupid, bleeding lacerations on her arm. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe evenly; to concentrate on the heart of the pain; to be present in it and so defeat it; as she had been taught to do. But she could feel her mouth twitching, and her fingers, and her toes; and she felt weak; so utterly weak and helpless; like the little girl who had been a runaway, and a hostage, and a prisoner; until namelessness and facelessness had freed her. She called out to both of them, and summoned her mask to protect her; to stop her from being that person again. But some parts of her face opened up as others closed; No one fragmenting and dying like a smashed mosaic under the weight of the pain that throbbed appallingly in every part of her body and made her squirm unconsciously in Jaime’s arms; as though she were lying on a bed of needles.

‘Stop that,’ Jaime told her.

‘Stop what?’ she murmured in response.

‘Whatever it is you’re trying to do with your face. Stop it.’

Arya glared up at him; fully intending to tell him that she’d do whatever she pleased with her own face. But Jaime’s own, when it met her eyes, was so pale that he might have passed for a Northerner, and his voice, when he spoke, was hollow and unsettled; as though he were afraid to speak, but incapable of remaining silent.

‘What has happened to you?’ Jaime asked softly, ‘how did you end up this way?’

She looked away from him, and tried to answer blandly.

‘My training –’

‘I’m not talking about your training.’

She knew that, and she feared knowing it.

 _Tell no one_ , her masters had said, _tell no one_ , _or it will be the worse for you_.

But she could feel it there: in him, and in her; the thing that had gone away; and she could feel herself as she was now: half Faceless Man, half human, trapped by Daenerys’ mercy. And he seemed to understand both of them; even though she had never spoken to him about either. And knowing that didn’t hurt.

‘When I first became…when I…when I first…when I entered the queen’s service,’ Arya began – tried to begin, ‘it was as a Faceless Man. As No one. My masters sent me to her as a gift –’

‘As a _gift?_ ’ Jaime repeated; the concept seeming to horrify him.

‘A – a token, if you will,’ Arya corrected, ‘a sign of support for her cause. She accepted me, but…but that wasn’t enough for… she told me that if I was to enter her service, I would have to remember who I was, because her… her _sensibilities_ would not permit her to be guarded by somebody called No one. I agreed, but…I just didn’t know that she would devote the next few months to making me remember everything about myself. She thought she could change me back just by talking to me. She wanted to ‘save’ me.’

Jaime grunted in impatience.

‘She got it half-right,’ Arya went on, ‘and it was an amateurish job to say the least.’ “Remember who you are, Arya.”

She paused, and remembered.

‘I love Daenerys,’ she said, ‘truly, I do, but…she had no idea that remembering is the single cruellest thing you can ask a Faceless Man to do.’

She looked up at Jaime. His face was asking her why. She felt the sound of his pulse. She felt the grief within it. And she knew that he would understand.

‘Shedding every last inch of yourself isn’t something you do out of a desire to serve God. Neither is devoting your life to the service of death. Nobody willingly comes to the House of Black and White. We all stumble through its doors…by chance, by accident…and we stay, because we have nowhere else to go. Because we’re scared. Because we’re all running. From hunger, from heartbreak, from death.…from ourselves if we can’t find anything else. When we finally lose ourselves – and we’re devastatingly well-trained in losing ourselves – it’s almost a relief. A rebirth. Everything that makes you who you are…pain, memory, anger….gone. Nothing exists anymore but you, and the lives you take. It’s the most exquisite nothingness; the best escape that exists. And Daenerys, well…her actions took that away. Not completely, but…enough.’

Arya’s breath caught in her throat, and her eyes screwed up tightly as another wave of pain took her; her own body so perfectly trained to obey that it rebelled against the desire of her own mouth to open up and speak. She forced herself to continue; the pain blinding her as she felt Jaime’s arms tighten around her.

‘When I was ten,’ she mumbled; her head nestling against his chest, ‘I met a Faceless Man…on the road North, and then while I was serving as your father’s cupbearer, at Harrenhal.’

‘At _Harrenhal_?’ Jaime exclaimed.

‘Yes,’ Arya replied, ‘but he didn’t know who I was, he…he saved…I wanted to kill him, but I –’

‘ _You served my father at Harrenhal?_ ’ Jaime repeated in disbelief.

‘ _Yes,_ ’ Arya repeated back at him, ‘terrifying old bastard, too; though I wasn’t scared of him.’

‘Is that…is that why you –’

‘What?’

Jaime paused.

‘Is that why you touched my cheek?’ he asked eventually, ‘on the night that we met?’

‘Yes,’ Arya stammered, blushing, ‘you have the same jaw. But that’s besides the point. When I was your father’s cupbearer at Harrenhal, this Faceless Man – his name was Jaqen – he offered me… it doesn’t matter… but…but he helped me to settle…certain debts –’

‘He killed people for you,’ Jaime chuckled.

‘He killed them for the Red God,’ Arya corrected; grateful for the lack of condemnation in his voice, ‘I merely had the honour of choosing whom he should offer up in sacrifice.’

‘Why you?’ Jaime asked.

‘I threw an axe at him.’

‘And he offered to kill people for you? I like him already.’

‘To save his life, stupid. He was locked up in the back of a burning wagon with two other hooligans that it would have been far better to leave to the flames. Three lives – three deaths.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Like I said, it doesn’t matter. But when our killing was done, and we eventually parted; I to look for my family, he to return to Braavos, he gave me an iron coin, and told me to –’

‘Once again, I don’t understand.’

‘It’s our order’s universal way of saying ‘don’t fuck with me.’ I never leave my chambers without at least ten of them in my pocket.’

‘I can well believe it. Why did you never give one to me?’

‘I didn’t know what they meant _then_ , of course,’ Arya mumbled, ignoring him, ‘he just gave it to me, and said that if I ever wanted to find him again, and learn to do what he could do, I should give the coin to any man from Braavos and say ‘Valar morghulis,’ and the coin would lead me to him.’

‘And it did?’ Jaime asked; the humour gone from his voice.

‘And it did,’ Arya told him, ‘eventually. When I reached the House of Black and White, they told me they had no idea who he was. I entered the guild anyway, of course. I had no choice, and I didn’t want one. I knew what I wanted to do, and I knew that it had to be done, even though his not being there when he had said that he would be was…can I have some more wine?’

Jaime passed her the skin. She drank till there was nothing left in it.

‘I was eighteen when he came back,’ she continued, ‘on the point of taking my vows, and of forgetting the few, tiny, insignificant pieces of Arya Stark that still remained to me. For some acolytes, this final stage of the process is easy. For others, it’s the hardest thing that they will ever do. Either way, each one of us is guided through it by a member of one of the guild’s higher orders. My masters assigned Jaqen to me. The fact that we’d met before wouldn’t matter if I planned on taking my vows seriously.’

She swallowed her own words. She tried to fold her arms and hug herself and hide, but the pain shot through her each time she moved; nailing her to herself, and in her mind she began to see the fountain again, the fountain and the half-light of the temple, and the dead around it; the symbol of the Red God’s mercy; his mercy to the living who no longer wished to live.

‘You don’t need to continue,’ Jaime whispered; his breath stirring the hair on the top of her head.

‘Having met before…it turned out to matter more than anything’ she stammered, ‘from…from the first second that we saw each other again, we…’

‘Arya, you don’t have to –’

‘We were fucked…we couldn’t stop it…not even if we tried…and we didn’t try. I sometimes think that was the worst part. He was everything. He showed me everything. He… taught me things. Things about facelessness that no junior guild member should know. The beauty of killing like a ghost; a wraith; a saviour. He told me things about himself that he should have forgotten about years ago. I did the same thing…I told him things that I thought had died.’

_She was walking to the fountain in the temple; not even knowing why she was there; only that she had to be. There hadn’t been a ripple on the water, and there had been no corpses beside it that day. Just the one. The only one that mattered._

‘It’s oddly exhilarating, being fucked and out of your mind,’ Arya remarked, beginning to talk faster as the memory caught up with her tongue, ‘it makes you feel alive, but it also makes you reckless and stupid. I don’t know what we were thinking, or hoping, or imagining, or even what we were doing; fighting all day; fucking all night; playing at being human –’

‘You _are_ human,’ Jaime interrupted.

‘I don’t know what I thought would happen once I had taken my vows,’ Arya continued; her voice growing hoarse, ‘I don’t know what _he_ thought; I don’t know. _I don’t know_.’

‘You’re distressed; you don’t need to tell me this –’ Jaime whispered.

‘There is a fountain at the centre of our temple,’ she rushed on, ‘one taste of the water guarantees a quick and painless death. People come to us there to pray and to die. One day, I went to see it. I hadn’t been there since I was a child novice; there was no reason for me to be there; it wasn’t my work anymore; but I knew that I should go; something told me that I should go –’

Her words were scattering like leaves in a hurricane now, and in her mind she was approaching the corpse on the floor; her footsteps agonisingly slow; as though slowness would change the fact; would make it less real for a little bit longer, and Jaime was telling her not to continue and angering her; but her words and the need to say them were smiting his and turning them to nothing.

‘I found him on the floor next to the fountain, lying dead on his back with his eyes wide open. His lips were still wet. I sat down next to him. He had hazel eyes. I looked hard at them. Once or twice I thought I saw them moving…or looking at me.’

Her voice sounded like ice in her own ears.

‘Our masters had given him a choice, or something that they pretended was a choice. Deny what we had done, and both of us would be executed. Admit it, and they would spare me, and let him kill himself to appease the Faceless God for the violation of the vows he had taken.’

A heat was rising in her eyes, and she fought against it with all of herself; forcing herself to continue; to finish even if the words made her choke to death.

‘It was all a lie, of course,’ she spat fiercely; her voice breaking as the ice exploded out of it and blinded her, ‘it was just some stupid _example_ being made out of him: they were only protecting the _politics_ that had made them accept me as an acolyte in the first place. Because our masters wouldn’t have executed me if I’d fucked a hundred men in the inner sanctum. They’d been intending to send me to Daenerys, under my true name, for years. They just didn’t bother to _tell_ me that – _they didn’t even tell Jaqen that_ – before they murdered him, and me –’

The heat in her eyes was becoming moisture now, and transforming into hot, salty drops of summer rain; and she gritted her teeth like a wolf and growled to herself; trying to make them flee from her in fear.

‘I didn’t take vows,’ Arya growled through clenched teeth, ‘because they wouldn’t let me. They sent me to Daenerys and ordered me not to tell a soul. I didn’t. And I didn’t take revenge; I didn’t make a single one of them pay for what they had done; because I was a Faceless Man in all but fucking name and oath by then. I became No one the moment Jaqen…’

The humiliation of the tears in her eyes was crushing her to death. It thrust knives into each individual pore of her body; twisting her wound, and wringing it out as though it were a wet cloth rather than blood and torn skin. She squeezed her eyes closed until they hurt her; the darkness behind her eyelids turning red from the pain; and a single, horrifying, humiliating tear choked out of her. It felt like wildfire burning her skin.

A whisper of cool air brushed it from her cheek. She opened her eyes. Jaime’s fingers were still touching her face. And he was looking silently and unconcernedly at her, as though she hadn’t humiliated herself in the worst way possible; as though that single tear hadn’t revealed a weakness that she couldn’t afford to possess. He did not say a word and he did not let her go; remaining where he was and holding her miserable, aching sack of a body together; his silence more consoling than anything he could have said. He knew about silence, of course. He knew everything that it concealed and everything that it expressed.

She stared up at him through her tears as the fire in her arm surged once more. He stared back at her; and she could see the missing-ness inside him as well; in his pallour and in his eyes that were green and damp and that _knew_ loss instead of presuming to know it. She could see it roaring in him, and hurting him. She saw Jaqen, dead; the hazel eyes that she had loved staring at her; maiming her; and she could see Jaime looking inside her with the same silent, desolate companionship that had both moved and frightened her at that infernal welcoming feast. The vision – the fountain, the eyes, the darkness – was brushed breathlessly away, thread by ghastly thread, as Jaime’s fingertips softly combed stray strands of hair away from her face, and he leaned forward and kissed her forehead as though she were some stupid child who had had a nightmare.

He did not move away from her once his lips had touched her forehead. They remained there, frozen against the skin; warming her up and giving her his breath to breathe with. She could feel her hand reaching out, and touching his cheek. Her eyes closed as she listened to him breathing. Then the sound grew louder, and warmer; and her blood blazed within her, and she couldn’t breathe, or see, or think; and when she opened her mouth for air, she found his lips instead; by accident; it must have been by accident; and she had no idea whose fault it was, or who had started it, but she did not pull away from him. She couldn’t. She didn’t want to.

The knowledge, and Jaime’s lips, almost burned her alive. He kissed her with an agonising softness; with something that she might have called innocence had she not known better. Her hands travelled slowly through his hair and traced the scars on his face, even as his body grew warmer and harder against her, and when she opened her mouth for his tongue, and tasted it, all thoughts of innocence disappeared.

He tasted of wine, and blood; and the way that he rolled his tongue against hers, and enfolded her, and sent his fingertips gliding up her spine to linger feverishly in the nape of her neck, made her moan aloud, and gasp, and forget the pain in her body. His lips were the sweetest kind of sorcery, and his smell, and the pulse of his blood in his chest, and she could not summon up the slightest trace of the guilt that she was sure she should be feeling, because her mouth being with his mouth, and her body being with his body, did not feel wrong.

They pulled away from each other slowly when the crack of leaves and voices announced that help was nearby. Jaime’s fingers locked tightly with Arya’s as his squire appeared with the maester and his assistants; the latter grumbling sulkily at the weight of the stretcher that they had had to carry from the camp.

‘This _idiot_ squire of yours,’ the maester cried, clouting the boy soundly over the head, ‘has led us on a merry chase across the whole of Westeros, the silly young –’

Arya stopped listening. She felt hands grip her arms and legs and lay her on her back; making her feel cold and sore again. She saw an open medicine case beside her, and more hands plucking milk of the poppy, wormwood, needle and thread from within it. The maester was cutting off her shirt sleeve and tittering about a hunt being no place for a woman. And still Jaime’s fingers were laced firmly through hers; gripping her hand; not letting her go.


	9. Chapter 9

Tyrion was woken by the feeling of Dany trembling violently in bed beside him. She had her back to him, and the early morning light scarcely lit up her silhouette; but through the obscurity of the silver dawn he saw her curled up like a dead leaf; her hands covering her mouth and smothering the sound of her own breath.

Tyrion gently put one hand on her shoulder.

‘Dany.’

She turned to face him, and her beautiful eyes were lilac with tears.

‘Tyrion,’ she whimpered softly, ‘Tyrion –’

He stared at her for a moment. He couldn’t speak. His voice was gone, and his breath with it, because Daenerys almost never cried; not even in private. She did not grant herself the right to. _‘I cannot cry, and be a queen.’_

He pulled her softly to his chest and held her there. It was like holding a frightened child. Her fingers traced frenetic circles on his chest, and her limbs were taut as bowstrings; nightmare still piercing her skin and filling up her lungs. Tyrion kissed her forehead and stroked her hair; his fingers looking as clumsy and ridiculous against the molten silver tresses as those of a child playing unsupervised with his mother’s jewellery. His instincts were telling him to say something to her despite what he knew to be her own wishes, but all that came to mind was some ill-conceived (if typical) jape about a deformed demon monkey standing loyally at hand to personally remove the balls of any person that tried to hurt her.

_Pathetic pathetic pathetic._

‘I dreamed of Lannisport,’ Dany whispered, ‘when I first smelled the smoke, and knew. I told myself it must be coming from Casterly Rock. I wanted it to be. But then I looked towards the sea. I saw the smoke. And the screaming started.’

Tyrion remembered everything about that day, but above all else, even above the fall of Casterly Rock, he remembered her.

 _‘I want it stopped_ ,’ she had shouted at Aegon when Lannisport had begun to burn and scream in the distance; raped and destroyed by Lady Sansa’s armies, ‘ _I want it stopped!_ ’

But Aegon had not heeded her, or summoned Sansa to answer for disobeying his orders that Lannisport be spared, and thousands of women and children had died only hours after their men had burned to death. Dany had stood motionless for hours in her black and red Targaryen armour, watching the smoke rise; unable to hold her tears back and snapping at every person that acknowledged them. Her hair had hung loose and undressed about her shoulders; as though she were a woman in mourning, but she had not granted herself the right to cry. _‘I cannot cry, and be a queen.’_

‘Everything’s wrong,’ Dany murmured; her voice like a hole in the earth, ‘isn’t it? The day I married Aegon, everything went wrong. I did it to _avoid_ killing innocents. Now I begin to think that…less blood might have been spilled had I simply sent Arya after him and taken his men.’

‘They wouldn’t have come,’ Tyrion whispered.

‘I did not want Lannisport to be…I did not want…my coming was not meant to end in this way. Not like this…there was too much blood at the beginning…too much pain. What we did to your homeland…to your brother – it was –’

‘Jaime deserved every minute of the pain you inflicted on him, trust me,’ Tyrion grunted; remembering the screams, and the refusals, _let me speak to him, just let me talk to him for five minutes…_

‘Tyrion,’ Dany murmured; her voice growing in strength, ‘you don’t mean that –’

‘I _do_ mean it,’ Tyrion growled; glaring at her and her sad, glorious, uncomprehending eyes.

‘Tysha was not –’

‘I don’t want to talk about Tysha.’

Dany fell sharply and abruptly silent, and said nothing for some time; her hand creeping into his, and holding it hard when he did not pull away. He wound his fingers through hers and kissed them.

‘Have you spoken to him?’ Dany asked, ‘since your return?’

‘No,’ Tyrion grunted; marvelling, for the thousandth time, at her constant desire to save all the world regardless of her own feelings towards them, ‘I’ve been far too busy wiping my arse with the contents of my desk.’

‘Tyrion,’ she retorted.

‘Don’t ‘Tyrion’ me, Daenerys,’ he snapped wearily.

‘It’s his wedding today,’ she pressed on, ‘there shouldn’t be strife between you.’

Tyrion gave her a withered look.

‘It’s a wedding, not a funeral. Well –’

‘It is a heavy burden that we place on his shoulders,’ Dany persisted, choosing to ignore the most important part of his previous comment, ‘he won’t be able to do it alone.’

‘He won’t have to,’ Tyrion droned, irritated by her persistence, ‘I’m supremely confident that he and Lady Sansa will have murdered each other before the week is out. We should prepare the city for war at once. I wonder if confetti can be used to soak up blood.’

‘I thank you for your confidence in our ability to rule, my lord,’ Dany growled; glaring at him as anger began to colour her voice.

‘ _Our_ ability to rule?’ Tyrion repeated theatrically, ‘I was under the impression that you wanted Aegon dead.’

‘So do you.’

‘Yes, only I’m smarter about it.’

Dany’s eyes flashed black, and indigo. She shoved Tyrion away from her, ripped the covers off and got out of bed; almost tearing her bed robe in half as she draped it around her shoulders and began to pace the room in rage; her eyes blazing and looking for something to throw.

‘Have I offended you?’ Tyrion drawled, looking about for wine, ‘I meant it as a joke.’

‘I doubt you’d be so inclined to jest if you were the one who had to bow, scrape and be fucked day after day!’ Dany spat.

‘Watching it happen to you is hardly pleasant, believe me!’ Tyrion shot back; rising and beginning to dress.

‘But joking about it _is_?’ Dany raged.

‘It is too soon for him to die!’ Tyrion exclaimed; sick to death of this having this argument, and wondering if she understood him at all, ‘if he dies so soon after your marriage, all anyone will see is another king in a long line of kings that have conveniently dropped like flies. Everyone would know it was you, and you would be neither feared, nor respected, nor loved for it. Everything that the conquest achieved – gone! It would make the monarchy as fragile, as disrespected and as pitiful as it was during the war years. It would _show people_ that three dragons are poor weapons against poison, or a knife in the dark – ’

‘They _are,_ Tyrion!’ Dany interrupted.

‘True, but do you really want the entire realm to know that?’ Tyrion agreed, losing his temper, ‘ _do you_? You make me wonder how in seven hells you didn’t get yourself killed when I was away!’

‘My existence depends on _you_ , does it?’ Dany shouted.

‘You know perfectly well I don’t think that!’ Tyrion shouted back.

‘On spreading my legs and keeping my mouth shut until you say otherwise?’

‘ _You agreed to this!_ It’s a little late to start complaining about it now!’

He regretted the words the moment he spoke them. They made him feel like his father. And Dany was glaring at him in utter fury; seeing him for the cunt that he was.

‘ _What did you say?_ ’

‘Forgive me; I spoke without thinking –’

‘Did you?’

‘Dany, please –’

‘I am your queen and the blood of the dragon, not some painted whore!’

‘I have _never_ called you a whore!’

‘That hasn’t stopped you treating me like one!’

‘I’ve done nothing of the sort, believe me!’

‘Only you would know!’

‘True enough!’

He immediately regretted saying that too. But it was too late. They were standing in silence, half-dressed and glaring cruelly at each other, and in Daenerys’ rage Tyrion saw her as he had dreamed of her every night during that entire year in Braavos; as he knew she would be if she ever learned of the drinking and the whoring that he had reverted to during his time away from her; the comforting debauchery that he had lived in for most of his life, and that he had promised her was over. He could see the accusation in the way that she looked at him, and it made him angry rather than regretful: angry at himself for being such a stupid, weak fool; angry at her for imagining that he would ever mention her in the same breath as the women that _made_ him such a stupid, weak fool…and angry at Varys. Because he had told her. There was no other way that she could have discovered it.

_You have nobody to blame but yourself, you fool. No one but yourself._

Tyrion walked to the nightstand beside the bed, bowed and quietly left through the secret passage; all without looking at her; all without speaking. Dany made no attempt to stop him, and he stumbled back to his chambers in the dark; imagining his fingers as they tightened around the eunuch’s neck.

 

* * *

 

Her corset laced up, and her hair dressed, Sansa sent her ladies away and sat alone before her looking glass. Her wedding dress hung by the window, spirit-like against the red sandstone of her bedchamber; cloth of silver woven with black pearls; turquoise silk worked into the dagged sleeves; excess upon excess; the South and all that she hated about it. Aegon had insisted on it, and she had obeyed him. A rare occurrence. Obeying the king at all was something that she only did grudgingly. When she had no choice. When it was necessary.

A sudden tactless rustling behind her made her whirl around in alarm; her heart thundering and her hand darting across the table for her dagger. But it was only her sister; leaning sheepishly against the wall, wearing those dreadful white leathers, and looking rather gaunter than was healthy. Sansa had not heard her enter the room at all. Perhaps it was a trick that she had learned at Faceless Men school; far away and safe across the Narrow Sea, when real people were fighting the real war: the war for the North.

‘Sansa,’ Arya greeted hesitantly.

‘Sister,’ Sansa coldly acknowledged; remembering the tourney.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t come to see you before now,’ Arya said, ‘I was afraid.’

Sansa had also been afraid, though she would never say so; declaring to all and sundry that she had come to court to see her little sister, only to change her mind each time she found her feet turning in the direction of the white sword tower. A rare carelessness on her part. A rare weakness.

‘I heard that you had a run-in with a pig,’ Sansa half-sang, half-smirked, ‘do the Faceless Men not teach their initiates to deal with that sort of thing?’

‘No,’ Arya mumbled; blushing in embarrassment.

‘Not even to practice on?’ Sansa enquired; her voice dripping with sarcasm.

‘No,’ Arya insisted, ‘we practice on humans.’

When Sansa snorted disdainfully in reply, Arya fell silent, and the anger, surprise, and hurt on her face were sufficient to make Sansa hesitate. She had only seen Arya from a distance since her return from Braavos, but Sansa had always been close enough to observe, and then to mock at the almost alarming coldness and reserve of Arya’s demeanour; at the fire that had gone out; the fire that Sansa had hated as a child; calling it uncouth, unladylike and barbaric. Until she had discovered it within herself, and seeing her sister without it had become almost unbearable.

But today she could see it burning bright in Arya’s eyes again; raw and unchannelled and unstoppable, and the rush of emotion that she felt; the weakness that she felt at the realisation…

‘You practice on humans, do you?’ Sansa repeated; the ridicule not leaving her voice, ‘and that left you so ill-prepared for the task of hunting pigs that it took one pig to save you from another?’

‘If Ser Jaime were a pig, he would have let me bleed to death,’ Arya told her; as though she were discussing the weather.

‘Nevertheless,’ Sansa snapped, ‘it seems a rather tame thing to call a child killer.’

Arya shrugged in response and winced in pain; the fingers of her left hand twitching as they fought the involuntary urge to move to her arm. As she watched her, Sansa felt the howling void in the pit of her stomach that had also come to her a fortnight ago, when she had heard the story of how her sister had been the first of the hunters to take up residence in the maester’s tent after Ser Jaime had found her covered in blood, in a state of near-madness and missing most of her upper arm after some fuck-up involving a boar. Enquiries made of her own spies soon assured her that it was nothing more than a bad bite, and that Arya’s good health and compulsive inability to be a good patient had left the maesters confident of a full recovery.

Many times Sansa had found herself on the point of having her horse saddled and riding out to the Kingswood herself. She had refrained from doing so just as many times. Her own initial panic had frightened her by virtue of its resemblance to the fear that seized her whenever she thought of her son in harm, and she could not afford to be compromised by such feelings now. It was only wise to distance herself from her sister, especially now, especially if tonight went ahead without Aegon or Varys managing to stab her in the back. But looking at Arya – her face like their father’s, her hair worn like their mother’s, and the return of the iron within…

‘How is your arm?’ Sansa asked; her tone somewhat kinder.

‘Fine,’ Arya mumbled grumpily.

‘Don’t lie,’ Sansa remarked.

‘I’m not lying,’ Arya persisted.

‘Why aren’t you in armour, then?’

‘It’s not my fault! Ser Barristan won’t let me go on duty again until it’s completely healed. What’s the point of that? I didn’t hurt my shoulder; I didn’t break my leg; I’m not even right handed!’

‘If you’re not on duty, you should be wearing a gown, then.’

‘No, I shouldn’t.’

‘Yes, you should.’

‘ _No, I shouldn’t!_ ’

‘It’s only ladylike, Arya!’

‘I’m not a stupid lady!’

‘Shut up!’

‘ _You_ shut up!’

‘No, _you_ –’

Both stopped; both realised; and Arya smiled, then Sansa. The past seemed to rise between them like a bridge; making them who they had been, and who they were, and Sansa remembered Winterfell, and being part of a pack; the days when she and Arya would have clawed each other’s eyes out twenty times a day if left to their own devices; unconscious and uncaring that their lives would never be so simple, or so happy, again.

Sansa went to her sister and embraced her. It was the first time that she had ever done so without squirming or wrinkling her nose. She felt Arya’s hands winding hesitantly around her waist; as though she were afraid of being touched, and Sansa realised with discomfort that her sister had no smell; not even of sweat or old leather. It was like hugging a ghost.

‘I’m sorry that I can’t be a real sister to you today,’ Arya told her, ‘and that I couldn’t be there for all the other times, to brush your hair and help you into your gown, and other…stuff. I don’t know about any of it.’

‘I don’t need you to brush my hair or help me into my gown,’ Sansa replied; the depth and abruptness of her emotion and honesty both surprising and frightening her, ‘you’re my blood. You’re all I have left.’

Arya did not reply. Or perhaps she could not.

When they broke apart, they stood looking awkwardly at each other; the lingering pieces of a circle that could not be completed until they both died: the same blood; the same circle; and yet, strangers. And suddenly Sansa wanted to know everything about her sister, and she wanted to tell her sister everything about her.

_I can’t. It’s too late. It’s too fucking late._

‘I’m not _all_ that you have left,’ Arya said suddenly, ‘I hear I have a nephew.’

‘Yes,’ Sansa nodded, smiling, and ignoring everything that her common sense was telling her.

‘How old is he?’ Arya asked, smiling back; the grin seeming strange on her face.

‘Remind me which arm you hurt,’ Sansa commanded.

‘The… right one,’ Arya replied, clearly baffled by the non-sequitur as Sansa took her left arm and led her to the window seat.

‘My boy is eight,’ Sansa said proudly as they sat down, Arya’s smile warming her more than she would have…‘he has blue eyes like his father’s, and the most ridiculously red hair that could be conceived of. He’s small for his age, but fierce, and stubborn as a mule.’

‘A true Stark, then,’ Arya grinned.

‘He is, may the gods help me,’ Sansa beamed, ‘the master at arms says he might have been born with a sword in his hand. Each time he falls, he gets up again and carries on; even if he’s bruised and bleeding.’

‘What name have you given him?’

‘Eddard.’

Arya’s eyes filled with tears, even as Sansa’s did, and when her sister’s fingers laced tightly through her own, Sansa did not pull away. She could see their father on the floor before them; his body lolling grotesquely as the Kingsguard leapt forward to retrieve his head before the crowd tore it to shreds. As a girl, she had fainted at the sight. She would never do that again. Never.

‘This marriage will mean being separated from my son,’ Sansa murmured; her heart heavy, ‘I shall have to go to Casterly Rock, no doubt, and…’

‘– there must always be a Stark in Winterfell,’ Arya finished.

‘A Hardyng, in this case,’ Sansa corrected testily, ‘I have applied to the king to have his name changed; so that our line may continue. He refused me.’

‘He’s always been a cunt,’ Arya growled.

‘An inexperienced fool, but hardly a cunt,’ Sansa observed, surprised at her sister’s rancour, ‘he may be a great king someday.’

‘He needs to be a great king _now_ ,’ Arya stated firmly.

 _How perceptive she is,_ Sansa thought, _perhaps I might…_

_No. Too late. Too fucking late._

_There is no guarantee that she can be trusted, no guarantee that –_

‘I pray you will excuse me, sister,’ Sansa said; trying hard to make her tone as cold as possible, ‘my ladies will return soon, whereupon they will attempt to lace me into that monstrosity.’

Arya looked at the wedding gown and pulled a face; showing no sign that her sister’s abrupt dismissiveness had wounded her.

‘I understand completely,’ she said, getting to her feet, ‘speaking to you has been…well…’

Sansa nodded regally in response, and watched as her sister crossed the room and closed the door behind her.

As the silence rushed in to fill the void, Sansa raised one hand and rang the bell for wine; determined to forget that this conversation had ever taken place. 


	10. Chapter 10

Jaime had spent most of the wedding ceremony gazing at the coloured glass and seven-pointed stars above his head and wishing that he were in his chambers, asleep and undreaming. All night he had dreamt of Brienne; watched her as she disappeared behind a wall of men, and sent corpses flying away from her as though their deaths no longer required them to return to earth. There had been pain, then darkness, then light, then more pain, and his knees sore and bloody, and the Brotherhood silent (he might have preferred it if they had laughed) as Brienne’s head was taken from her shoulders. _‘Taken.’_ Some fool of a butcher who had never held a sword in his life had been elected executioner. It had taken him four swings to get the fucking job done.

But this time, unlike all the other times that he had dreamt of that day, it hadn’t been _her_ head that they had dangled in front of him, but Arya’s; cut from Brienne’s body, and still alive, and speaking to him as blood dripped from sliced and torn and severed skin: ‘it’s not my blood,’ she said.

He had felt his mind attempting to push through the borders of his dreamworld and to take him to the Kingswood a fortnight ago, and to everything that he had felt there. But sleep had only let him see the very end of that day, when he had helped the maester’s assistants to get Arya onto the stretcher. Her hand had still been clutched in his, cold and sweating, and she had screamed in pain when they had lifted her, and she had not let his hand go. And as they had set her down, she had whispered in his ear ‘Keep the peace.’

He had wanted to snap her neck then and there out of pure rage and disbelief that she had not changed in her opinion of this… _ridiculous_ plan for peace. And rage and disbelief, when wedded to his fucking memory of every fucking moment that he had spent with her, had soon transformed into panic at having been so stupid. He had let her…he had shown her…seven fucking hells, he had actually _shown her_ what used to be his skin, before the Targaryens had decided to use it for fucking target practice, _he had actually shown her…_ and still she could… _you trusting bloody_ fool, _what were you thinking.._.

And then, to add insult to injury, she had kissed him: without apologising, without blushing, without caring. And then, ‘keep the peace?’ What the fuck did that mean? _Why kiss me in the first place if she wanted me to ‘keep the peace?’_ Why? Why not push him away from her the moment it had started; why not have an attack of righteousness when she had heard the maester coming, instead of pulling her lips slowly away from his for what had felt like an eternity; inch by unhurried inch of skin; evading, delaying, prolonging, and almost making him love her in that moment; for her passion; for her guiltlessness?

_So why tell me to keep the fucking peace?_

It hadn’t taken him long to realise why, of course. She had been badly hurt, and delirious, and afraid, and vulnerable; and even more so after rasping out the story of what those fucking Faceless shits had done to her. She had been so emotional after that that Jaime felt sure that she would have kissed anyone that had had happened to be there, if it would only bring her some semblance of relief.

_She kissed me because I was there._

Realising that had seemed far worse in the dream than it had in reality, but still, he had dreamed on; his mind refusing to release him. The maester’s assistants had lifted the stretcher; Arya’s hand had been yanked roughly out of his, and Jaime had shrugged quietly to himself and wondered if the little bitch was in the right after all.

_Why not ‘keep the peace?’ I’m obviously such an infernal idiot that my choice of wife is not likely to make much difference to me. So why not choose a woman that makes some difference to the realm? At least I will have done something right – or tried to._

By that time, it had felt as though he had been dreaming about death, daftness, decapitation and bloodied women for days and days, and he had wanted to wake up, or at least to dream of something else. But silk had turned to steel and locked him out of waking and dreaming, and he had been sent to the beginning again; to the nightmare; to Brienne; to the Brotherhood. And when he had started awake on the morning of his wedding; his dreams still clouding his vision like fever, he had realised that if the stupid, stubborn, blockheaded wench had still been alive, she would have wedded and bedded whomever the king had consigned her to if it had meant the slightest possibility of peace; and that if she had been here, with him, she would have caved his head in with something heavy and metallic and very likely unpleasant for refusing to do his duty. She was precisely that sort of imbecile. The same sort of imbecile as him, only uglier, and prouder to admit her own stupidity.

 _If she were here with me,_ she _would be my wife, and this entire mess would never have happened. I would probably have asked at some point. I would have._

But she wasn’t here, she wasn’t his wife, and he hadn’t asked. So he had gone to the sept, and been wed, and the gods had smiled on him by ensuring that he had felt nothing during the entire course of the ceremony and paid almost no attention to what was happening around him and noted, with neither pleasure nor chagrin, that the tension in the sept had not changed at all; and that North and South were still glaring at each other as though they would prefer to face hellfire rather than reconciliation.

Night had fallen now, and Jaime was loitering in some ridiculous cloistered garden, drinking from one bottle of wine, gazing at the strands of moonlight that danced in the depths of the one that he intended to drink next, and listening to the sound of laughter, music and wedding guests getting drunk in the great hall. He was far enough away from the celebrations to avoid throwing up in sheer revulsion, and close enough to know when he would have to make an appearance again. He had already had more to drink than was wise, and he was now pondering the question of which prospect he found the most unappetising: another night of nightmares, or the idea of fucking Lady Sansa. Perhaps if he smothered her with a pillow and said that he had fucked her to death…

Jaime laughed aloud at the thought, tried to take a swallow of wine, and swore. The bottle was empty. He dropped it, took a thoroughly childish pleasure in the sound it made as it smashed, and reached for the second bottle that he had brought with him out of habit. Tyrion’s bottle. _One bottle for him, one for me_ , _and then another, and then another,_ as it always was when they got drunk together. Now Tyrion would sooner drink Manticore venom than do so much as speak to him.

_I can’t blame him. I’d have put a sword in his belly had he done to me what I did to him._

As he put the bottle to his lips, and drank; the taste made his heart go black inside him: as black as it had been on the first day of the hunt when he had drunk from the skin handed him by his squire, and seen Arya crawling out of the trees.

The fear that he had felt at the sight of her, looking as though she had been dipped in a vat of blood….he had wrapped himself around her, and her body had been freezing…and the wound…the quantity of blood that she had lost…and yet she had still been capable of speaking; capable of being conscious...the maester had said later that the bite looked worse than it was. Jaime didn’t know. Her face had resembled a map: lined on one side, blank on the other; a shield that she had raised and lowered, time and time again. And yet after a while, she had stopped trying, she had given up on guardedness, and told him what the thing was that he had always seen in her; the thing, a thing, one of many things, that made her just like him.

_Much good may it do her._

Jaime forced down another mouthful of wine as he remembered the fury with which she had fought her own tears; as he would have done himself had their positions been reversed, but that he could not find the strength to condone in her. The wine danced softly on his tongue and sent a paralysing weakness into his limbs; as her lips had done, and he had wracked his brains in every moment that she had come into his mind since then – in the split seconds that lingered on the edge of his present desire to slit her throat – trying to remember who had started it, who had moved first, who was responsible, and he could not remember a thing. Only that it had felt good, and that the idea of thinking of another word for it made his head hurt.

A bird perched itself on a rosebush some three feet away from him and began to sing with an air of such decided spite that Jaime had half a mind to throw his dagger at the impudent avian idiot and see how well it could chirrup when speared into the opposite wall. The thought made him listen to the sounds around him for the first time in what felt like hours. What he heard drew him to his feet, and made his blood run cold.

He heard nothing but birdsong. No music, no laughter, no raucous conversation. Only pure and absolute silence: not the serene quietness that descended on a mind transfixed and set aglow by wonder, but the harsh and howling void that tore like wind across the patient, unbloodied space between two warring armies.

 _Perhaps Aegon has called for a minute of silence_ , Jaime thought with very little hope; his heart beginning to convulse in his chest.

He turned in the direction of the hall and strained his ears. The world was as silent as a crypt. His hand came to rest on his sword. And he realised that the sound he heard was not a minute of silence, but the sound of a thousand people holding their breath.

 

* * *

 

The grey Northern lord’s dagger had pierced the yellow Southern lord’s neck. The Southern lord was rasping like a landed fish; his gasps huge and eternal and louder than the scrape and rattle of wood on stone as guests rose to their feet to watch; some eager, some despairing, some disbelieving, all silent. Every pair of eyes in the hall, save one standing at the back, watched the yellow doublet turn slowly and gradually red, and the Southern lord wearing it tottering, and beginning to fall.

Arya, standing unarmoured behind the queen despite having been commanded off duty, scanned the room for Ser Barristan and Loras; though she knew that they had left the hall to escort Aegon to his chambers only a short while ago. Her eyes shot calmly and systematically from one gap in the crowd to the next and did not find them. She stepped quietly up to Daenerys’ side, her hand on her sword, and joined the rest of the hall in watching the yellow Southern lord breathe his last.

He hit the ground; blood spraying the floor around him, and the taut, brittle, dreading silence did not become questioning, or hesitant, or stronger with calls for calm and reason from either North or South. Figures rose up around Arya, and from the tables below and with them the sound of war; and silence was annihilated as hundreds of wilful and eager butchers hurled themselves across the hall like armies to rip flesh from the bones of men and women both; throats gouged out, limbs removed, entrails expelled and heads cut from bodies, all in a matter of seconds counted out in the roaring of curses, war cries and fulfilled vengeance.

Arya pushed Daenerys’ chair backwards, onto the floor and out of the line of fire; almost growling aloud in impatience at the resulting cry of pain as she pulled Daenerys roughly out of the chair and onto the ground.

_Honestly._

Then the dagger appeared in her sight, buried up to the hilt in the queen’s thigh, and Arya realised, with a sudden, seething understanding, that the weapon’s not being similarly buried in Daenerys’ throat was only a matter of the unexpected change in position across the few seconds it had taken for the chair to fall.

_Fuck._

Daenerys’ face contorted in pain and turned the colour of snow as Arya shielded the queen’s body with her own and crouched in front of her like a cat, sword in one hand, dagger in the other, painfully aware of what her present strength and the lack of armour on her back meant for Daenerys’ longevity as she faced down the evening’s first two idiots; her sword slicing through the ankles of the first fool and her dagger through the balls of the second. The bodies fell bleeding and screaming to the floor, Arya moved once more to her place in front of Daenerys, and a sudden flash of blood-stained white and silver came over the maimed men before her as Ser Barristan and Loras rapidly speared their swords through her assailants’ throats.

‘What in seven hells have you done to her?’ Loras demanded, staring at the queen.

‘Pick her up and shut up!’ Arya shouted; looking about her and realising that she could not see Sansa.

 

* * *

 

‘Take the dagger out,’ Daenerys commanded through gritted teeth; her voice echoing menacingly off the stone walls of the secret passage, ‘ _take it out!_ ’

Loras, who had been commanded by Ser Barristan to sit on the floor next to Daenerys and ensure that she did nothing of the sort, graciously presented the half-delirious queen with his deepest regrets that he was unable to obey her.

‘If I remove the dagger, Your Grace,’ he said, ‘you will bleed to death.’

‘Far worse will befall _you_ if you do not do as I say, Ser,’ Daenerys snapped stubbornly; sweat beading on her forehead as the fever began to take her.

‘Explain yourself,’ Ser Barristan gruffly demanded of Arya, ‘why push her chair over when pulling her out of it would have worked just as well?’

‘The dagger would be buried in her throat had I taken that course,’ Arya replied quietly, ‘which of course is what Aegon wants.’

‘Lady _Arya_ ,’ Ser Barristan warned sharply.

‘Take it out, _please_ ,’ Daenerys rasped; trying to take hold of the dagger and growling when Loras prevented her.

‘There is absolutely no proof that the king was responsible for this,’ Ser Barristan continued.

‘Then why retire so early?’ Arya hissed; wishing for the first time that Daenerys had allowed her to take the Lord Commander into her confidence, ‘why retire before midnight on the day the Seven Kingdoms are finally united; on the day he supposedly sees his life’s purpose fulfilled? What sort of monarch does that?’

‘Careful, little lady,’ Ser Barristan snapped, ‘what you say is treason.’

‘I am a traitor’s daughter,’ Arya shrugged, ‘it must run in the family.’

‘ _Gods be good,_ must I slap you?’ Ser Barristan hissed.

‘Who guards the king at present, Lord Commander?’ Arya asked, with rather more cheek than was respectful.

‘Ser Rolly,’Ser Barristan replied; his voice beginning to turn grey with doubt.

‘Gods be good,’ Loras growled in disbelief.

‘Lord Commander, we cannot disregard this!’ Arya insisted.

‘ _I will burn…them…all…_ ’ Daenerys grimaced, ‘ _I will take what is mine…_ ’

‘I will not believe that a son of Rhaegar Targaryen would compromise the unity and peace of his kingdom merely in the name of assassinating his queen,’ Ser Barristan declared, ‘the notion has no sense in it.’

‘ _There is perfect sense in it!_ ’ Daenerys growled with a sudden, feverish lucidity; trying to get to her feet and yanking Loras’ cloak by means of demanding assistance, ‘since the son of Rhaegar Targaryen is lying _dead_ with a _crushed skull_ in whichever ditch Tywin Lannister tossed him into thirty years ago. Aegon has plunged the entire realm into _anarchy_ for _ambition_ …orchestrated a bloodbath…a false dragon who thinks he can slay a true one through _trickery_ and _dishonour_ –’

‘Your _Grace_?’ Ser Barristan interrupted.

‘I will hear no…more…talk…of… _peace and quiet_ ,’ Daenerys spat, ‘if my husband wants a war, _he has more than earned one_ –’

‘Your Grace, please,’ Ser Barristan pleaded, ‘you are in no fit state to –’

‘ _I will decide what state I am in,_ ’ Daenerys snarled; looking like a blood-stained corpse in the darkness, ‘we will make for Dragonstone at once…my armies will come to me there…I will call for allegiance across the whole of Westeros, and then I will come back here and rip that fucking impostor’s throat out with my own teeth!’

‘Your Grace, there is no –’

‘ _Silence!_ ’

Ser Barristan fell silent.

‘Ser Loras,’ Daenerys said, her skin starting to turn grey from shock and her face convulsing from the effort of hiding her pain, ‘I shall need you to carry me; we’ll move faster that way. We’ll take the passage under the serpentine to the Mud Gate; I doubt the fighting has spread that far yet. Ser Barristan, Lady Arya –’

‘We will provide cover, Your Grace,’ Ser Barristan declared.

Arya, nodding, said nothing; her right arm beginning to throb severely as Loras scooped Daenerys up and began to walk; Ser Barristan guiding their passage from the front and Arya bringing up the rear. The narrow passageway echoed with no other sound but that of their footsteps, and the ghastly, involuntary groans of pain that came bubbling up from Daenerys’ throat. The queen’s head hung limply back, and her breathing was shallow and cruel. Her earlier outburst had taken strength and reality from her, and in a matter of minutes, she began to whisper deliriously, and her hair to veritably glisten with sweat.

‘My children,’ she whispered, ‘my children – ’

Arya looked to Ser Barristan for orders.

‘ _No_ , Arya,’ the old knight said pointedly.

‘My children…’ Daenerys whispered again, beginning to struggle in Loras’ arms, ‘where are they; I want them –’

The whispers soon became cries, then piercing screams as the idea of leaving the dragons behind penetrated Daenerys’ blood-clouded mind, and she began to thrash about and fight as both Loras and Ser Barristan attempted to restrain her and reason with her and prevent their voices being heard by any passing little birds. But the dragons had become the only thought in her head, and the thought renewed her strength.

‘I cannot leave without my children; _let go of me_ , if I leave them behind _he’ll_ have them; I’d rather see them dead; I’d rather be _dead_ – ’

‘Your Grace, _please_ ,’ Loras pleaded; trying to stop her from kicking as her bleeding worsened; her struggling dislodging the blade and cutting deeper.

‘ _Put me down, make yourself useful and find Tyrion!_ ’ Daenerys half-screamed, half-begged, ‘he’ll know what to do; he’ll find a way; I know he will; he’d never ask me to leave them; he’ll find a way – ’

In a corner of Arya’s mind, she thought that she ought to be doing something to help: seizing an arm, clapping a hand over Daenerys’ mouth, knocking her unconscious, trying to think of the last time she had seen Tyrion; whom she cared for, but whom she had not sworn to protect with her life. But in that moment she felt Drogon, Rhaegal and Viserion in the earth beneath her feet and imagined them bound to Aegon. She remembered what Aegon had used them to do; Casterly Rock; Lannisport after the sack; survivors exterminated in their homes with dragonfire; the screams, because Jaime had refused to swear allegiance; refused to succumb quietly to what had already happened –

_Oh gods. Jaime._

‘Seven gods, where’s Tyrion?’ Daenerys was screaming; her delirium escalating to full-on hysteria as the full implications of the dwarf’s absence became clear to her, ‘what have they done with Tyrion; why isn’t he here; take your hands _off_ me; Tyrion…TYRION!’

Arya ran.

She could hear Ser Barristan and Loras shouting after her as she hurtled back the way they had come. She could feel blood soaking into her shirt sleeve from where her stitches were no doubt coming undone, and the pain coming with it. But the heart in her chest no longer pumped ice. She had a name, she had a face, and when she flung open the hidden door, she entered the light without hesitation.


	11. Chapter 11

‘Fuck!’

Jaime spat out another ten obscenities before slamming Tyrion’s chamber door shut and cursing his lying bastard of a brother for being four feet tall and impossible to find; and without warning, the entire, endlessly long corridor in the Tower of the Hand began to shake as though heaven and earth were being rent asunder. A thundering, powerful, harrowing screech pierced the air and crashed into Jaime’s mind like a tidal wave of grief and horror, and he was flung off his feet and into the opposite wall as every window around him smashed. He felt shards of glass hitting his face; some cutting him; some glancing off him like raindrops. And he heard that infernal cry on the air once again and could not allow himself to contemplate what it might mean; but he leapt to his feet nonetheless, blood streaming down his face, and went to a window, a window frame, and he saw them, all three of them, huge, infernal shadows against the stars; circling, then diving, then opening their jaws.

Mountains of fire were exploding from the mouths of the dragons and roaring into the walls of the Red Keep like missiles. Glass no longer exploded, glass melted, and turrets and battlements and the white sword tower and the entire west wing were burning and collapsing; and suddenly the hordes of Northerners roaming the halls screaming ‘Justice for the Starks’ and the fact, not lost upon him, that every troop of black cloaks he had met that night had tried to kill him, no longer mattered; only the memory and the boiling rage of Casterly Rock and Lannisport and what those fucking dragons had done.

A chorus of laughs and roars and shouts made him step back from the window into the path of the group of black cloaks that were rounding the corner at the far end of the corridor, and as another shriek sounded from the beasts in the sky above them, Jaime drew his sword and faced them down; not caring how many of the fuckers there were and determined to drag as many of them down to hell with him as he could.

‘Come at me, you cunts!’ he roared.

The men obliged him; the dragons on their breastplates glinting coldly; and the sight made him grip his sword harder and grin at the thought of the blood inside them. But they were freezing suddenly in their tracks, abruptly and in unison, and crying gruesomely out as though they had all been felled by the same great, unseen blade, and crumpling to the floor and hitting the floor and dying; and Arya was standing behind them; her left hand flung out in front of her as though she’d just thrown a dagger.

Jaime was thrown off his feet and landed hard on his back as the corridor was gripped by another spontaneous earthquake; the child of dragon screams, or the collapse of the halls around them. He tried to rise, and couldn’t; the pain in his back turning his bones to powder. Arya appeared half-upside down in his vision; ignoring both him and the dust raining down on her head, and crouching down beside one of the corpses; dagger at the ready. The image of her swam as Jaime blinked and fought and called the pain into himself, and she was wearing a brown leather belt that he’d never seen before; extending diagonally across her body from her right shoulder to her left hip, and decorated with a dozen battle scenes imprisoned one below the other in embroidered frames no larger than tinder boxes. The tinder boxes soon turned out to be compartments for the storage of the gods only knew what, and Jaime stared silently as Arya wordlessly began to dig…something…out of the spine of each corpse and deposit it in the top compartment of her belt; each something still covered in blood and gore.

She remained at work when the air once again filled with the shouts of men at arms, and Jaime had scarcely wondered where the fuck these people found the energy to climb all the stairs in the Tower of the Hand when there must have been easier killing to be found elsewhere, when another group of black cloaks appeared, and Arya kept butchering the corpse she was occupied with as though nothing in the world was the matter.

‘ARYA!’ Jaime shouted; almost screaming aloud at the pain as he tried to sit up, and she rose with an eerie kind of calm; her dagger still clutched in her hand, and stood quiet as stone as she watched the men in black and red, and waited for them to come to her.

Her speed was incredible. He could see every muscle in her body twisting and stretching taunt and filling up each thrust she made with the might of her entire body and mind working together in the power of a single, diminutive point of the blade that she held in her hand. She moved from man to man like a wraith; her form blurring as her dagger, her true hand, jabbed tiny, identical, deadly holes in the throat of one man, in the inner arm of the next, in the wrist of the one after that; and life would shoot from each man in crimson fountains and jets of blood that made each of them fall rapidly to earth like sacks of meat; murdered by the strength of their own heartbeat. It was the kind of game that had no time for second thoughts, or maiming, or chivalry, or tourneys, or legendary duels that lasted for days. It was designed only for death; for killing and killing quickly, and she was death’s pale and beautiful child in Kingsguard leathers, who danced through airborne drops of blood, faster even than them; her work cold, methodical, alien, glorious. As the last man fell to earth, she inexplicably knelt beside her victim and plunged her dagger into his throat a second time; and at the death rattle of his breath her eyes flashed upwards to Jaime’s like the glint of sunlight on Valyrian steel, and in them he saw the fire that he had been searching for in the seemingly glacial way that she ended life. It was a fierce joy that he knew; that he lived for, and he could see it burning bright in her and parting her lips and making her breathe deeper as she slowly pulled her dagger from the corpse.

The floor rattled once again, and the night sky screamed with dragonfire, and Arya was sheathing her dagger and glancing in horror at the shattered windows; then back at him.

‘Can you stand?’ she asked.

‘Of course I can stand!’ Jaime snapped.

She didn’t even stay to watch him do it; leaping to her feet as he painfully rose to his, and dashing to a window frame. The largest of the dragons was circling, and preparing to attack once again, and as Jaime joined Arya at the window and observed the tightness in her lips and suppressed remorse pulsing in her throat, he asked her, though he already knew the answer:

‘How did they get out?’

‘I let them out,’ she replied without hesitation; her eyes still fixed on the dragon.

Jaime stared at her in disbelief and did not even try to conceal his fury.

‘Why the fuck would you –’

She turned to face him; her fury matching his.

‘If you think for one second that I would let that little shit Aegon have them –’

‘ _Are you completely mad?_ ’

‘Fuck yourself, Jaime!’

‘ _Do you have any idea what you’ve done?_ ’

‘No, I’m blind, deaf and stupid!’

‘I couldn’t agree more!’

The dragon attacked; the fire dislodging and melting stone far closer to the Tower of the Hand than was comfortable, and tremours once again began to shake the corridor around them and dislodge red dust from the ceiling that plummeted down onto the pool of corpses and covered them like earth.

Jaime blinked as another screech of triumph rent the air, and Casterly Rock was burning around him and turning him cold each time he closed his eyes; making him angrier at himself and far angrier at her.

‘I didn’t _know_ that they would do this!’ Arya was protesting hotly.

‘You decide to loose three fucking dragons into the largest city in Westeros _and it doesn’t occur to you that they might start burning things down?_ ’ Jaime shouted at her, ‘ _are you fucking insane?_ ’

‘Thousands more people would have died if I had left them where they were!’ Arya yelled in reply.

‘Bullshit!’ Jaime spat.

‘I did _what needed to be done!_ ’ Arya shouted; a kind of cruelty creeping into her voice that Jaime suspected was intended for herself as much as for him, ‘ _and I don’t give a fuck if you don’t understand why!_ ’

That statement reminded him far too much of himself for his liking – particularly the blatant untruth of the last part – and ignoring it; he continued to make furious enquiries as to the state of her mental health.

‘Since we’re on the subject of insanity,’ Jaime said, ‘what are you doing up here in the first place? Shouldn’t you be in a secret passageway somewhere; helping those silver-haired shits run for their miserable lives?’

‘Why aren’t you running for _your_ miserable life?’ Arya scoffed.

‘I had to know that my brother hadn’t been burned to a crisp!’ Jaime barked.

‘ _So did I!_ ’ Arya shouted; the fingers of her left hand beginning to twitch uncontrollably.

That made Jaime pause.

_She’s lying. At least partially._

_No matter. So was I._

Arya was trying very hard to stare out of the window and appear absorbed.

‘Is – is he here?’ she asked; cocking her head towards Tyrion’s door, ‘in his chambers?’

‘No,’ Jaime replied shortly.

There was a slightly awkward silence, and cessation of movement; except for Arya’s fingers; which seemed to have acquired a life of their own as they danced like spiders on a sheet of ice. And as the idea of lying once again entered his mind, he began to remember the words that Arya had just spoken to him and not spoken to him, strange words and absences of words that he should have questioned, but that had disappeared beneath anger and amazement as soon as they were spoken, or not spoken: _if you think for one second that I would let that little shit Aegon have them…_ the no-answer, the question, with which she had greeted his inquiry about the king and queen that she should now be protecting, instead of standing up here with him watching the world end.

‘Arya,’ Jaime said, ‘where are the king and queen?’

She did not reply for a moment.

‘The queen has been injured,’ Arya responded, ‘Ser Barristan and Loras are seeing her out of the castle. She intends to declare war the moment she can find a pen and paper.’

‘ _On whom_?’ Jaime growled.

Arya did not reply.

Jaime watched her wrestle with the words as they disappeared on the way to her mouth, and he thought. He thought of the mysterious desire each black cloak seemed to have acquired for seeing his head on a spike. He thought of the screeching, triumphant cries: ‘Justice for the Starks.’ He thought of the talk at the wells that Lady Sansa shared more than just her ideas with King Aegon. And he thought of the thousand contradictory reports he had heard from the countless terrified wedding guests and servants that had crossed his path in the halls: ‘the North was offended that the king retired before the bedding,’ ‘two lords had a quarrel over a courtesan,’ ‘an assassin tried to kill the queen and missed,’ ‘Lady Sansa ordered her Northerners to kill every man in the hall,’ ‘a Northern lord stabbed a Southern lord and war came again.’

_The queen has been injured…_

‘Someone wants a war,’ Jaime ventured.

‘ _The king_ wants a war,’ Arya corrected.

Jaime cocked an eyebrow at her.

‘He’d start a war just to kill the queen? That’s rather –’

‘Stupid?’

‘Or brilliant.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Nothing. It’s the sort of thing Tyrion would say.’

Arya glanced rapidly out of the window at the flames devouring stone and sky, and then at Jaime. Her eyes were wild.

‘We have to find him.’

Jaime nodded.

Arya turned away from him and set off down the corridor without another word; stepping gingerly over the corpses with far more care than any of them deserved. Jaime was about to follow her when the window frames began to shake with more power than ever before, and the screeches of the dragons to seem louder and more terrible. The sensation tore his gaze away from Arya’s slowly retreating form; drawing it out of the window and towards the sky, and the black dragon in his sight began to dive downwards, to the right, to the foot of the adjacent wing of the Tower of the Hand, where it opened its jaws and vomited a hurricane of tall, screaming flames through the great iron doors.

They melted.

Jaime watched, mesmerised, disbelieving, as the inferno blasted its way through antechambers and halls and corridors; up flights of stairs and down them; blowing out windows and showering the night air with stars made of half-melted glass. A new serpent, a serpent made of fire, snaked upwards and upwards with an unholy, unquenchable, unstoppable speed, as though every floor in the tower were nothing but a fragile wooden step in a treacherously flammable spiral staircase, and Jaime felt the floor beneath his feet beginning to hiss and crack _seven hells, everything beneath us is burning too_ , _the entire tower is burning,_ and as the windows, walls and battlements level with him in the adjacent wing went up in flames; he realised what that meant, and his heart stopped in his chest.

The shock to his body made him jerk away from the window, and turn.

Arya, clearly still determined to find Tyrion despite the chaos, was halfway down the corridor and running; running straight into a place that was empty, and howling, and waiting, and that would soon be smothered and crushed under the weight of fire; and the world around Jaime was plunged into darkness; as dark as it had been the first time that she had run from him; nine years old and wild; a little girl that he had tried to kill because his fucking sister had told him to. He had let her run, all those years ago, but if he let her run now, she would do more than sprain her ankle. She would die.

He had no idea how he reached her in time. He might have shouted…or perhaps he simply ran faster than he had ever run before…or maybe she hadn’t been as far away as he had imagined. But whatever he did, however he did it, he could hear the flames tearing through the nearby walls and corridors like paper, with the might, with the power, of an approaching army; and in the split second between seizing Arya’s elbow and beginning to run back the way that he had come, the wall of fire came roaring around the corner; its jaws extending from floor to ceiling, and he was yanking Arya around, and running like a madman, and propelling her straight through the door of Tyrion’s chambers as though she were a battering ram.

They dashed through the anteroom, the council chamber and the solar; Arya slamming each door shut behind them, though she must have known that it would buy them split seconds at best.

As the sound of fire demolishing the anteroom door ripped through the air, they reached the bedchamber that had once been Father’s. Jaime tore across the room to the hearth, reached out for the hidden mechanism and prayed to the Seven that Cersei hadn’t somehow convinced herself that sealing the secret passageway after Father’s death would discourage defiance.

She hadn’t.

Jaime seized Arya by the collar and roughly shoved her through the hole in the fireplace floor; and as he followed suit; almost falling as he slipped down the first rungs of the ladder and released the catch that pulled the entrance closed above him, he observed Arya several feet beneath him; holding onto the ladder with one hand and glaring up at him; her feet dangling precariously into the empty air.

‘Next time there just _happens_ to be a twenty foot drop,’ she growled, ‘ _tell me first._ ’

She gained a proper hold and soon disappeared from view; gliding into the darkness beneath him like a sailor descending a rope. Jaime could hear the sound of the dragonfire as it decimated Tyrion’s bedchamber, and the threat of it roared above him as he slowly and awkwardly followed Arya down into the black; screaming at himself to hurry up, and expecting, every moment, to feel flames bursting into the space above his head and melting the stone of the entrance; the steel of the ladder; Arya’s flesh; his flesh; their bones; and sending both of them crashing and burning to their deaths.

Nothing happened.

He could hear the flames, he could feel their heat on his face, he could smell their destruction, and yet they had no power here; inexplicably kept at bay by one, miserable piece of stone when the entire fucking Red Keep was burning.

 _Bloody Targaryens_ , Jaime thought; the stench of burning stone hot in his nostrils and the stench of failure black in his mind.

Tyrion was in the castle somewhere; _out there_ somewhere; alive…or turned to ash… _dead, most likely; of course he’s fucking dead don’t delude yourself don’t be a fool he’s dead and you didn’t save him. Because he wasn’t the first person you thought of when you realised what was happening, was he?_

At the bottom of the ladder, when his self-condemnation had reached the point of self-cruelty, he found Arya standing against a wall with a face like horror, and stubborn grey eyes full of tears that she couldn’t allow to fall, and he knew that she was thinking the same thing. The shirt-cuff peeping out from beneath the right sleeve of her white leathers was blood red, and a stream of the stuff was leaking gently across her hand, down her index finger and dripping onto the floor. Nothing in her face told him if it was her blood, or someone else’s.

Looking above him, to the smell and the heat of the dragonfire, and the sight of the ladder leading from chaos down into darkness; he saw fire glinting in the small dragon sconces above their heads; lighting up stone eyes, jaws, teeth: little infernos that could not destroy; that could hardly maim at all. And he remembered the last and only time that he had come to this place; when it had been so dark that his hand had been invisible before his face, and he had not known if the ladder extended for ten feet, or a hundred; he had not known if he was descending to a single chamber, or to a labyrinth. Then the guards had lit the sconces with torches, and this chamber, at least, had been flooded with light; and Jaime realised that today, now, he shouldn’t be able to see at all, because he and Arya had brought no torches with them; because when he had opened the entrance to this place, the world beneath him had been black as pitch.

‘I lit the sconces,’ Arya mumbled.

Jaime looked at her, then up at the sconces, and down again.

‘ _How?_ ’ he demanded.

She shrugged, sank to the floor, and didn’t reply, and Jaime watched, silent and helpless, as the colour drained from her face and the guilt tore out her tongue.


	12. Chapter 12

He must have fallen suddenly asleep – he would not acknowledge the possibility of having passed out from exhaustion – and when he opened his eyes the dragon sconces were still sending monstrous shadows chasing across the walls, and the person who had apparently ignited them was sitting on the other side of the chamber from him; attempting to stitch up her own arm.

Her doublet and sword belt were piled untidily on the floor beside her; her shirt, bloodied, lay torn to shreds in her lap; leaving her torso in the clutches of a laced-up undergarment that resembled a corset, but which the character of its owner prevented him from branding as such. The leather shoulder belt that he had observed earlier was laid carefully out on the floor in front of her, and a ball of black silk thread, punctured with needles of various sizes, nestled neatly on top of one of the belt’s middle compartments. Her face was utterly calm; her shoulders were bare and pale as marble (in steep contrast to the blood that was pouring down her right arm); and as Jaime watched her working steadily with needle and thread, he observed that the place where the boar had bitten her looked like such a gruesome mess that he could not conceive of how she was managing to work.

‘Ever heard of swabbing?’Jaime jeered.

Arya looked up at him.

‘You’re awake,’ she replied.

‘You’re making a mess,’ Jaime said; getting to his feet and walking over to her; trying to ignore the pain pulsing in his back.

‘If I swab, it bleeds; if I don’t swab, it bleeds,’ Arya grumbled; glaring at him as he sat cross-legged in front of her and casually pulled a strip of shirt from her lap, ‘I’m saving time.’

Jaime rolled his eyes.

‘What did the Faceless Men tell you to do in cases like these?’ he asked.

‘They told me to swab,’ Arya snapped.

Jaime grunted in laughter and began to mop up the bloodstream that was coursing from the wound and down her arm in rivers. The strip of shirt turned red; leaving the ghost of war branded into her skin each time it came away, and when his fingers reached the wound and began to gently work at the stitches that had already been completed, he observed with surprise that they were perfectly straight, and executed with a militaristic neatness that he found profoundly disturbing under the circumstances. Still more disturbing were the scars that had suddenly become visible on her shoulders and arms, and that torchlight and shadow had concealed when he had first opened his eyes. There was one particularly unpleasant disfigurement on her left upper arm that could only have been caused by an arrow or a crossbow bolt fired at close range. There was an equally-gruesome explosion of formerly-torn skin in the groove above her left collarbone, a mesh of smaller cuts and slashes scattered about her shoulders, and a thin line that ran almost across the entire circumference of her right wrist; as though some fool had tried to chop her hand off.

Jaime shuddered, tossed the piece of cloth away from him and tore off another, and for a while they worked together in silence; Arya indifferently puncturing her own skin; Jaime cleaning up after her. He thought of the world above them; and how she had made it burn, and for a moment he could not think at all; blaming her; not blaming her; blaming his brother; not blaming him.

‘I can’t stop thinking about Tyrion,’ Arya murmured suddenly.

‘I know,’ Jaime mumbled; a part of him wanting to tell her that she’d forfeited the right to worry about Tyrion the moment she had set the dragons loose.

But Arya’s face was pale with a remorse too genuine to justify such an outburst.

‘Were you friends?’ Jaime asked.

Arya paused at his use of the past tense, and stuck the needle into her skin one last time before replying.

‘In Braavos,’ she told him, ‘we were together for eighteen hours a day – sometimes more – for a year. He spoke; I interpreted. He drank; I listened. That creates a kind of understanding; strange as that might sound.’

_Oh gods._

‘He didn’t try to fuck you, did he?’ Jaime chuckled; secretly dreading the answer.

‘No,’ Arya replied; her face breaking into an affectionate smile as she separated needle and thread with her dagger,‘he wanted to a few times, but no.’

Jaime felt half-disconcerted that she could know his brother so well after so short an acquaintance; and half-relieved for reasons that he preferred not to contemplate.

‘If he didn’t try anything, then how can you be so sure that he _did_ want to?’ Jaime scoffed, taking one end of the thread while she took the other.

‘A woman always knows,’ Arya shrugged.

‘I promise you, she doesn’t,’ Jaime mocked as they knotted the threads together; flinching as an unexpected and blood-curling scream ripped forth from Arya’s throat.

He’d pulled too hard.

‘ _Gods_ , Jaime!’ she yelped weakly; clapping her left hand instinctively down on the wound and leaning forward as though about to faint, ‘are you trying to fucking kill me?’

‘Stop whining; at least they’re not coming undone anytime soon,’ Jaime remarked nonchalantly; though he wanted to reach out and touch her shoulder in apology the moment the words were out of his mouth.

But he couldn’t do it. If he did, she’d feel his hand shaking and his heart beating; and besides, he was not in the habit of apologising to people.

So he watched her straighten up and shrug on her doublet, and for the first time that evening, it occurred to him that seeing her half-clad in such a manner was both improper and very likely dangerous, and he soon found himself sitting against a wall and gazing up at the dragon sconces as though nothing could be more fascinating. He listened to the sound of the clasps of her doublet as she fastened them– they clicked like crickets in the dark – and the tiny, tuneless song they sang was like an old friend to his ears. He had worn the same uniform for thirty years…after all.

Arya did not stand up to put on her sword belt; buckling it about her waist in a thoroughly sloppy and careless manner that he would have reprimanded her for had he still had the right to. To her shoulder belt, she gave infinitely more care; replacing the needle and thread in the bottom compartment and lifting the belt carefully over her head as though it were made of glass.

‘Where did you get the belt?’ Jaime asked.

‘How did you know about this place?’ Arya asked, at the same time.

Jaime almost groaned aloud.

‘You first.’

‘Why?’

‘Just remembering my courtesies, Lady Stark.’

Arya rolled her eyes at him.

‘This place, Ser Jaime,’ she repeated, ‘how did you know about it?’

‘We discovered it on the morning my father was found dead,’ he said; trying to sound indifferent, ‘I led a detachment of guards down here to look for Tyrion.’

Arya’s face fell slightly, as though she were remembering something terrible, and Jaime felt compelled to ask her:

‘How…how much did Tyrion tell you?’

‘Everything,’ Arya softly replied; her voice and face entirely void of judgement, and Jaime found that he minded, a great deal, that she knew anything about it at all.

He would never forget the look in Tyrion’s eyes when the truth had come pulsing out of Jaime’s mouth: in the black cells, in the dark, in the heat, too many years later; too late…and then the words that Tyrion had spoken in response; the hate that had appeared in him, and then Father, lying dead with a fucking crossbow bolt to the balls.

 _I should have told him the truth about the girl from the beginning. I should have been a brother to him; a real one. Father shouldn’t have mattered, he shouldn’t have – and_ this _girl, the one beside me now, should not know about it. I don’t want her to know about it._

‘Your turn,’ Jaime rapidly proclaimed; Father’s ghost disappearing with his words, ‘tell me the sweeping story of the brown leather belt.’

‘It’s Jaqen’s,’ Arya said slowly; the name jagged and painful on her lips, ‘when the fighting started, I went upstairs to destroy my case of poisons. It was in my trunk. This was next to it. And I couldn’t…’

She bit her lip, and looked away.

“… leave it behind,” Jaime murmured.

Arya nodded, and smiled at him with all the unassuming familiarity of the bereaved acknowledging the bereaved, and began to fiddle with a loose piece of embroidery on one of the belt’s compartments.

‘Faceless Men don’t typically walk around armed to the teeth,’ she told him, ‘so he almost never wore it, but…he kept things in it. Interesting things to use for killing. Darts coated in wolfsbane; roses marinated in Manticore venom –’

‘Did he have something against cutting people?’ Jaime asked, appalled; anger beginning to blister his insides, and everything that he was rebelling and sickening at the thought of using poison, a coward’s weapon, to kill a man.

‘He was _extremely_ fond of cutting people,’ Arya responded; her tone unchanged, ‘he just found the way a blood smell lingers on hands and clothing rather tedious. These were his favourite.’

She opened the top compartment of the belt, removed something from it, and passed it to him. It was a tiny, blood-coated triangle made of what seemed to be Valyrian steel; lighter than a whisper, and the size of a signet ring. He turned it over in his fingers.

It looked like it belonged on a cyvasse board.

Jaime’s lip curled in disdain. He thought back to the first complement of guards that Arya had killed…the way that she had come into view behind them, her hand flung out in front of her, as they had fallen to the floor like flies; the way that she had bent over each corpse, dagger in hand, and had dug some invisible object from the spine of each man. His own mind could offer him no explanation for it. But _this_ – this was no explanation at all. This was a fucking joke; a joke and a _lie_ ; and he began to chuckle, in anger and mirthless ridicule, that she could think him fool enough to believe her; that she could lie to him and still look at him as though he were some kind of fucking _relief_ ; that he had left his _own brother_ behind for a person who trusted him less than she would a sellsword of non-existent intelligence that she had paid up front.

‘Are you _fucking_ with me, Lady Stark?’ Jaime demanded venomously.

Arya cocked an eyebrow at him.

‘What’s wrong with _you_?’ she scoffed.

‘Do you take me for a fool?’ Jaime growled.

‘I’m starting to!’ Arya snapped; not even having the good grace to look ashamed of herself.

That only served to make him livider.

 ‘You couldn’t kill a _fly_ with this!’

‘A handful of those can take down twenty men, if you know the way!’

‘Gods, you’re a terrible liar.’

‘I’m a _brilliant_ liar!’

‘Do you really expect me to believe this?’

‘Right now, I don’t care what you believe!’

‘If you can’t tell me something, or if you simply don’t want to, _say so_ , don’t –’

‘Fuck off, Jaime!’

‘ _This_ isn’t possible!’

‘ _Yes it is!_ ’

‘This is a puny piece of scrap metal that couldn’t – _fuck!_ ’

The triangle had sunk into his thumb and cut him almost to the bone. Arya unceremoniously yanked it out.

‘You were saying?’ she demanded irately as a surprisingly large amount of blood began to pour out of his thumb.

Jaime did his best to look as though he _hadn’t_ just made a spectacular arse of himself.

‘Not bad for a collection of eastern trinkets,’ he shrugged.

‘ _A collection of eastern trinkets?_ ’ Arya repeated shrilly; hurt beginning to creep through the cracks of her indignation.

‘Forgive me,’ Jaime said sweepingly; telling himself that the sudden moisture in her eyes was down to anger and nothing else, ‘would you prefer the term ‘magical eastern trinkets?’

‘Only tricksters and deceivers work with ‘magical trinkets,’ you… _stupid_!’ Arya yelled, ‘the rest of us use our _brains_.’

‘The _rest_ of us?’ Jaime scornfully laughed, ‘is _that_ what you spent so much time learning in Braavos? How to turn men into rats and rats into dancing drinking horns?’

Arya flew at him, and the entire chamber was plunged into darkness with a howling groan that resembled that of a dead man breathing his last, and she was pinning his knees to the ground with her heels and his arms against the wall above him with one hand; her other hand drawing her dagger with an audible _shick_ of Valyrian steel and thrusting it roughly against his throat; and as he felt her breath ice cold on his face and her dagger ice cold on his throat, and heard the patient, cold-blooded, horrifying-steady sound of her breathing, he was gripped by the most complete, unequivocal and all-encompassingly paralytic terror that he had ever experienced. His limbs were turning to mortar; making him feel as though he were being crushed beneath a weight of stone and rock that he could not shift. He tried to move his legs; his hand; his fingers. He couldn’t. He couldn’t struggle. He couldn’t fight. He was interred in marble like a corpse. Her strength was impossible; gigantic; unnatural; _she could not be that strong_ ; and her voice as she spoke was utterly without mercy.

‘How would you like to _die,_ Lannister?’ he heard Arya spit; the tip of the dagger dancing repulsively on his throat.

And the dagger was beginning to slice at him; tearing a long line in his flesh from collar bone to navel, and as fire erupted across the wound he saw a light dancing in the darkness; the tip of a sword, red hot, white hot. Chains were holding him down; hands were holding him down; and he was screaming in agony as the sword drew patterns on his chest; the smell of burning flesh almost making him gag, and a voice was speaking above the screaming, ‘Swear allegiance, and this all goes away,’ ‘ _Fuck yourself,_ ’ he spat in reply, and they brought the burning sword down on him again, on his back this time, and pressed it into his shoulder blade and held it there while his skin melted and blood erupted out of his mouth as he prayed for death, and death never came. And torches were lit, blinding him and taking the darkness with it, and he was shuddering so violently that he couldn’t see, and Arya was there; in front of him, against him, terrified; clasping his face and shouting.

‘Jaime. JAIME!!! You’re not there. _You’re not there!!!_ ’

For a moment, he could not understand what she was saying. He blinked at her and mumbled something, and she embraced him and held him so hard it hurt as she jabbered a constant string of short, identical words into his shoulder, ‘I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,’ and he could feel his own arms around her waist and torture still screaming in his head and shuddering in his body, and she was holding him tighter and whispering, ‘You’re not there. You’re not. You’ll never be there. If anyone tries to do that to you again, I’ll kill them; I’ll cut off their faces.’

‘ _How_?’ Jaime muttered; trying to stop his voice from shaking as he remembered the blackness and the weight.

‘Jaqen taught me to do it,’ Arya whispered; knowing immediately that he wasn’t talking about cutting off people’s faces, ‘just how to make fire, nothing else; nothing else, I promise; I didn’t know you would –’

Her hair smelled like smoke. He could feel her heart beating against his chest. She continued to murmur ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ and as she held him he felt the world coming back; stone and light rising around him; her limbs sheltering him there; keeping him anchored to the rock. His left hand had come to rest in the small of her back, and he kept it there; feeling it rising and falling with her breath; and he was breathing with her, in and out, his body moving slowly with hers, and _I’ve become weak_ , he thought, _weak and ridiculous. Undone by dreams and darkness; like some green boy who’s never fought a war in his life._

‘Arya,’ Jaime said, in as amused a voice as he could muster; glancing down and pretending to notice their position for the first time.

‘Yes?’ she asked.

‘You’re sitting in my lap.’

Arya froze for a moment, before looking downwards and also deigning (or feigning) to take initial notice of the fact that her intentions could easily be mistaken if taken out of context. She stood hurriedly up, stepped away from him, and strode across the chamber to the tunnel entrances that were carved into the rock.

‘Do you know the way?’ she asked.

‘Part of it,’ Jaime replied; clambering to his feet and joining her.

She was eyeing the confined space and intense darkness of the tunnels with a keen, worried and blatantly transparent eye, and Jaime could not help but resent her for it.

‘Jaime,’ Arya reluctantly ventured, ‘should you really be –’

‘I’LL BE FINE!’ Jaime shouted; with more ferocity and far greater volume than he had intended.

Arya backed off immediately and showed him both her hands.

‘Forget I said anything!’ she exclaimed, before thrusting her hands into her belt, glowering at him, and mumbling under her breath:

‘Gods, you’re a shit.’

 

* * *

 

The tunnels only seemed to have gained in unpleasantness since the last time Jaime had been forced to crawl through them. The awkwardness of it was made infinitely worse by the pitiful radiance of a discarded, ancient, half burnt-out torch that Arya had found in the tunnel mouth, and by the excruciating soreness that plagued his entire body; as though he’d been ambushed in a back alley and beaten to within an inch of his life.

He hated growing older. He hated the weakness of it; the restraint; the surprised, mocking gazes every time he held a sword, silently asking him if it still belonged in his hand. He hated the faces he met; the faces that wondered, the faces that hoped, that he was a foolish old man whose fighting days were done; who had only months left before a younger, stronger, more brilliant opponent would meet him on the field of battle or the tourney ground and send him from this world with a whimper rather than a roar.

He thought of what had happened in the chamber with the ladder, and felt so ashamed he could hardly see. What a monumental fuck-up. To go to pieces like some fucking squire with his first head wound; no, worse than that, like a stupid child who had had a nightmare; and then, worst of all, to find himself in the company of somebody who indulged such nonsense instead of cracking him on the head and flogging him half to death with the ridicule that he deserved.

And then that business with Jaqen’s triangular trinkets – where in seven fucking hells had that come from? He could not even remember when the argument had started, or why; only that he had been curious one minute and livid the next; livid, and paranoid.

Both reactions were somewhat atypical to a casual discussion with a young assassin about the lover who had taught her to kill, and Jaime rapidly pushed aside the possibility of his being jealous of a dead man before determining to concentrate on crawling, and nothing else, until they reached the dragon mosaic.

Upon entering the tunnel he had realised, much to his chagrin, that his golden hand would not support the weight of his body, so he had once again found himself crawling awkwardly forward on his elbows like some common foot soldier scouting out enemy lines. He did not like to admit the possibility of having lost even _more_ weight since the last time he had been forced to scramble around these tunnels like a fucking earthworm, but he could think of no explanation for the raging discomfort in his arms and the bone-numbing pain in his elbows other than their being skin and bone and precious little else. His only comfort was that Arya seemed to be having a far worse time of it than him; the added burden of the torch making her snap and grumble to herself at intervals as she lighted the way ahead of them.

Comforting or not, the entire situation was starting to be a dreadful bore, and as Jaime watched the light of the torch flickering on the low ceiling of the tunnel, he thought about the moment that Arya had found the torch; picking it up and not giving it a second glance as it had burst into flames, before getting down on her hands and knees and disappearing into the black. Jaime, who had been expecting dramatic incantations and hand movements of the kind that would provide him with hours of ammunition in any future confrontations with her, had been rather disappointed, and he determined to ask her about it straight away; even if only as an antidote for boredom.

‘Is conjuring up fire from thin air something all Faceless Men learn to do, Lady Stark?’

Arya, clearly still angry with him, snorted and did not reply.

‘No, then,’ Jaime ventured.

Still no reply.

‘Either you can answer the question, or I can keep rephrasing it until –’

‘High order guild members are allowed to use magic; no one else,’ Arya impatiently snapped, ‘I only know because Jaqen taught me.’

‘Do your masters know that Jaqen taught you?’

‘They’d have flayed me alive if they did.’

That remark, and everything that Arya had ever told him about the way Faceless Men punished their own, made Jaime fall silent as they crawled deeper and deeper into the labyrinth beneath the Red Keep; his mind becoming a tangled web of uncertainty, half-admiration and half-anger, both at Arya, and at her mentor who was dead. How could Jaqen have understood the consequences, the harm that could come to her if he taught her what she was not meant to know, and then go ahead regardless? How could he do that?

He thought about it; thought about Arya; and chuckled to himself.

_Something tells me it wasn’t his idea._

‘It’s a pity that particular spell isn’t powerful enough to burn Aegon alive,’ Arya was saying, ‘but you can’t have everything.’

‘Gods, you really _do_ hate him,’ Jaime observed.

‘He’s a fraud, and an arse, and he tried to kill my queen,’ Arya steadfastly declared, ‘of course I hate him.’

‘Such misplaced loyalty,’ Jaime smirked, ‘Queen Daenerys must be bursting with pride…what do you mean, ‘fraud’?’

‘What do you mean ‘misplaced loyalty’?’ Arya snapped.

Jaime ignored her. He was remembering two fragile little bodies in red cloaks lying smashed and bleeding on the floor before the Iron Throne, and Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon screaming at each other while Father looked on and waited. The smallest had been a baby…and saying that his skull had been ‘crushed’ was a very gentle way of putting it.

‘But the hair,’ Jaime muttered, ‘the eyes; the modesty and munificence of temperament, how –’

‘He’s a Blackfyre,’ Arya interrupted.

Jaime’s head was beginning to spin in a most unpleasant manner.

‘Are you saying that the male line wasn’t really exterminated?’ he demanded.

‘It _was_ exterminated,’ Arya drawled; sounding increasingly irritated with having to talk and crawl at the same time, ‘Aegon’s pedigree comes from his mother.’

‘Who was his mother?’ Jaime insisted, ‘who was his _father_?’

‘I can’t tell you that,’ Arya said.

“I can’t tell you that,” Jaime repeated, ‘do you have any idea how ridiculous you sound?’

Arya stopped crawling, set the torch down on the floor and looked over her shoulder at him. The position looked uncomfortable.

‘Are you _ever_ going to shut up?’ she asked crabbily.

‘I simply feel a little fucked-over that there are now even _more_ of these half-mad dragon spawn pyromaniacs to contend with!’ Jaime retorted.

‘Daenerys is not a half-mad dragon spawn pyromaniac!’

‘She isn’t? Is she also a fraud, then?’

‘Jaime, do you honestly expect me to believe that you hated every Targaryen you ever met?’

‘So a Blackfyre is pretending to be a Targaryen and pissing all over Daenerys’ right to rule, and you hate him for it. That’s all?’

‘That’s all.’

‘You’re lying! You told me as much!’

Arya cursed, picked the torch up, and began to crawl again. Jaime swore in his own turn, and was about to follow her when she flung the torch down, stopped and once again looked over her shoulder at him.

‘Once, on night duty, Aegon put his hand on my cunt and tried to kiss me,’ Arya said, ‘he’s been begging me to fuck him ever since. Satisfied?’

Jaime almost choked on his own astonishment.

‘He did _what?_ ’

‘You heard me.’

‘What did you _do_?’

‘I broke his nose.’

Jaime stared briefly at her; tried to hold himself in; failed miserably; and promptly burst into fits of hysterical laughter; the confined space and the echoing walls making it sound as though a group of particularly rowdy prison guards were getting drunk somewhere in the heart of the labyrinth. He could hear Arya trying not to laugh, and for some reason this only made him laugh harder.

‘Do you have to do that so loudly?’ she prudishly grumbled, ‘the ceiling could collapse.’

Jaime ignored her.

‘You broke his –’

He couldn’t finish the sentence; it was simply too hilarious –

‘Is that…is that why his nose looks crooked at the top?’ Jaime asked; his eyes starting to water.

‘Yes,’ Arya admitted sheepishly, finally starting to laugh, ‘I tried to break it back into position afterwards, but it wouldn’t go –’

‘You were trying to make it worse, you little shit!’

‘Maybe.’

‘He tells people it’s a _hunting injury_!’

‘My idea. I suggested the least-convincing explanation I could think of.’

‘Why you –’

They sat cackling in the dark like lunatics until their insides hurt too much to laugh further. The walls around them were quiet, and the silence gave no hint of what was happening above them. Arya picked up the torch and groaned at the sight of the never-ending dark before them. And Jaime resolved that if, by some miracle, he ever saw Aegon again, he’d do worse to the fool than break his fucking nose.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Arya’s little triangular friends are a homage to David and Leigh Eddings’ Dagashi.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Early chapter! Enjoy!

The Iron Throne was gone.

Aegon sat alone in the smouldering ruins of the throne room, watching the boiling, molten mass of iron as it hissed and began to solidify into a puddle of nothing on the marble steps. A freezing wind from the early morning sky above him made him shudder despite the dragon blood that ran in his veins. And he had no words or thoughts for the shame…the wrath…the desolation…none of those words meant anything when faced with this. The eternal symbol of the most powerful dynasty in history; the great throne of his ancestors, forged in the fiery breath of Balerion the Dread; three hundred years of might and majesty destroyed in a single evening.

Aegon breathed deeply and regularly; his mind rising up and fighting the hysteria that was beginning to choke him.

_It will not take me as it did my grandfather. I will destroy myself sooner than let it take me. I am a Targaryen, of the blood of Old Valyria. I control the fire, not the other way round._

And yet Drogon, Rhaegal and Viserion had not heeded him that night. They had destroyed the fucking Iron Throne rather than heed him.

 _Perhaps I made a mistake_ , he thought.

_There are no mistakes with dragonfire. It bends to your will, or it consumes you. Nothing in between._

It was still unknown how the dragons had escaped. Aegon’s small council, a group of imbeciles more concerned with the apparently-unbearable heat of the ruined throne room than with providing prudent council in the face of disaster, suspected that someone had released them (‘ _of course someone released them_!’ Aegon had roared at that). But however the thing had been done, it had been enough. There were hundreds of casualties and thousands of injuries across the city, both from the wedding massacre and from the fiery carnage that had followed it. The dragons had destroyed every manse in King’s Landing, but had somehow managed to spare the whole of Flea Bottom. Maegor’s Holdfast was the only thing presently keeping the Red Keep from being considered a pile of rubble on Aegon’s Hill, and the list of persons missing, presumed escaped, grew longer and more alarming by the minute: Daenerys, Barristan Selmy, Loras Tyrell, the Imp, his crippled brother…and Arya, whom Lord Varys claimed had been responsible for the dagger’s having entered Daenerys’ thigh as opposed to her throat.

 _A thigh wound is no joke_ , Aegon thought, _Daenerys may yet die_.

 _The people, however, will take it as a sign from the gods._ _A king rejected by the throne does not long sit it, and there is no rejection more powerful than this._ _My lords will flock to Daenerys’ banner, and the people will flock with them. Rebellion will come soon. Not war. Rebellion. And Arya, no doubt, will be where I cannot protect her; where she has been from the beginning: at the side of the pretender who would take my throne from me._

Aegon would never forget that first parley with Daenerys, before the walls of Storm’s End. He had come ready to do what he had spent his whole life preparing for: the son of Rhaegar Targaryen uniting himself to another of his line; readying himself to bend the earth to his will; making dragons fly in the skies again; taking back the Iron Throne; fulfilling his sacred duty to his House and his slaughtered kin.

It had been easy, at first. Daenerys had been sharp, proud and beautiful: everything that a Targaryen queen should be. He had been exceedingly pleased with her. Then a shadow had stepped up to her side; tall and silent in white cloak and armour; dark hair gathered over one shoulder and glistening like a waterfall of ebony silk. He had stared into her eyes – grey, silver, like the wind – and he had found utter emptiness staring back at him; darkness, unease, death. It had been like a firestorm in his soul; the destruction and negation of everything that he was born to be. Because from that moment onwards, he would have given up everything that he had ever worked for; without hesitation; without second thoughts; had he only been able to make Arya Stark smile.

But she never smiled for him. She never laughed. She never spoke, unless spoken to first. She didn’t even like to look at him for too long. He had tried, so many times, to talk to her; to get her to say something; anything. He had watched her even when she could not see him; observing her as she was when unobserved. Every day he had wanted to peel off her shell and feel the skin of her true self beneath his lips. He had wanted to know who she was, and what she was running from.

But there had been no getting past her unfailing politeness and unshakable coldness, and that same reserve had never left her; not even in battle; not even in the face of death; not even after a dozen sieges and twice as many battles acting as Aegon’s sworn shield…not even on the first night after the fall of Casterly Rock, when she had been deathly pale and beautiful as moonlight, and he had wanted her so much it ached.

He had made a fool of himself, and she had never ceased to make a fool of him from that night to this; standing there in his vision like a stone statue; staring at him and glancing away the moment their eyes met; shifting and swallowing each time they were left alone; making him want to believe that her feelings had changed; making him think that her feelings _had_ changed; maddening him; enflaming him; playing with him in this manner for weeks on end; then stepping back from him in revulsion – _revulsion_ – each time he tried to touch her. The look in her eyes; the cold horror on her face…it was inhuman.

And yet he still wanted her. He would still imagine her beneath him each time he was fucking Sansa; see her face flushed with desire; hear her panting and moaning as he thrust his cock deeper into her; wanting him; begging him. Once, he had screamed her name while he was coming. Sansa hadn’t been able to stop laughing for ten minutes afterwards. Apparently the hilarity of his wanting to fuck the glacial Arya Stark automatically pardoned the insult; at least in Sansa’s perverse mind.

Eventually, a part of him had come to realise that nothing would ever change; no matter how much he wanted it to. She had allowed the ice to penetrate too deeply into her soul. There was no reaching her; not now, not ever. The realisation had caused him more pain than he would ever have been able to describe; the unfairness of it; the _thought_ that the love of a King of Westeros was not powerful enough; inspiring enough; flattering enough, to expunge years of self-effacement, and whatever else it was they’d done to her, far away across the Narrow Sea.

But then the tourney for Sansa’s wedding had taken place, and Jaime Lannister had offered the crown of winter roses to her on the tip of his lance…and like a Northern spring, she had broken through the ice, and breathed.

Her face had been extraordinary. Her eyes had turned to wildfire, and her skin to the colour of blood and snow, and she had glared at Jaime as though she had wanted to murder him where he stood. And there had been no reserve, no coldness, no unwavering politeness, but passion. Fire. Emotion. She had looked at Jaime as she would at a lover; the transformation beautiful; exquisite; alive; and Jaime had stared back at her, looking very pleased with himself; and the piercing silence, and the threat of war, and Daenerys’ frantic whisperings had meant nothing to him, because the only, pathetic thought in his head had been: ‘why him?’

Aegon had done his best to forget that question the moment it had occurred to him. It was weak, juvenile and unworthy of a king. But when the hunt had taken place in the Kingswood…when he had heard of her injury and gone to her in the maester’s tent with his heart in his throat, he had found himself asking it again, and out loud.

He had found her dead to the world, sleeping off a boar attack and half a gallon of milk of the poppy; and the sound of him entering the tent must have awakened some tiny, inexplicably-conscious part of her, because she had shifted slightly, and had murmured softly in her sleep: ‘Jaime.’

It was incomprehensible.

 _Why him? Why in seven hells – him? The man is an empty shell, a cripple, a traitor, an arrogant fool more than twice her age who pushed her brother out of a_ window _, for fuck’s sake; who brought one of the greatest Houses in Westeros to ruin because he couldn’t keep his cock out of his own sister._

_Has she lost her mind???_

‘Your Grace.’

Aegon jumped at the voice, but relaxed at the familiar sight of Varys looking politely down at him; his eyes tired, but alert.

‘I have heard many new songs this past hour,’ the eunuch said, ‘some more interesting than others. Would Your Grace care to listen?’

Aegon hauled himself to his feet, and brushed the ash from his doublet. Black and red turned grey beneath his hands.

‘By all means, Lord Varys,’ Aegon said, ‘let us hear what your little birds have to tell us.’


	14. Chapter 14

They had crawled around in the tunnels for hours; through the belly of a stone serpent with low ceilings, narrow walls, near-total darkness and almost no air. And while Jaime hated the fucking mosaic that he knew was on the other side, and wished to all the gods that he could have the chamber that held it demolished, he had never felt happier to see a three-headed dragon in his life as he and Arya finally crawled out of the tunnels and collapsed, exhausted, onto their backs.

Jaime breathed and breathed, the ceiling high and distant above his head, his muscles aching and cramping, his head spinning. Beside him, he could hear Arya doing the same, though she was wasting most of her breath on swearing, and it wasn’t very long before she was lying on her stomach, laying her cheek against the floor, and staring at the mosaic that spread out across the entire floor of the chamber; stupendous, eroded, malevolent in its magnificence.

‘It’s extraordinary,’ Arya murmured.

‘You’re in no position to make comments about dragons being extraordinary,’ Jaime grunted; quietly enraged that she should speak of such things as though she were on a tour of the Free Cities.

Arya propped herself up on her elbows and looked at him; her grey eyes vivid with…was it disappointment? Fucking _disappointment_?

‘Jaime, I couldn’t have left the dragons where they were.’

‘So you keep saying,’ he snapped.

‘I _had_ to do it,’ Arya insisted, the earnestness of her expression and the beautiful flush of her indignation only serving to make him angrier, ‘you don’t understand –’

Jaime snorted in disdain, looked pointedly at the ceiling and said nothing in reply.

She didn’t hit him, or order him to look at her, but as she silently bristled beside him he fancied that he could almost feel her biting her lip and staring at her hands as they began to tremble in anger. Then she cast her eyes downward, so he couldn’t see what was in them, and _anger is the least of what she feels_ , he thought.

‘Releasing the dragons will bring eternal dishonour on my name,’ Arya softly pronounced; managing to sound tormented and uncaring all at the same time, ‘people are hurt; people are dead; people who were somebodies to hundreds of other somebodies…’

‘You should write poetry,’ Jaime scoffed, still not looking at her.

‘ – but if I hadn’t done it; if I had left the dragons with Aegon, he would have _used_ them,’ she plunged on, ‘and the sieges of King’s Landing, and Casterly Rock and Lannisport would be _nothing_ compared to what he would do; because he can’t be trusted; _he can’t be trusted_ to use them as the last resort they’re meant to be; every time they were deployed in force during the conquest, it was his idea; _his idea_ , Jaime, not Daenerys’, and even if everyone told him not to, he would go ahead and do what he liked anyway –’

‘What _Sansa_ liked, do you mean?’ Jaime spat, still not looking at her, ‘your bitch of a sister, my _wife_ , who is only my wife because you and Brienne somehow managed to –’

‘Who’s…Brienne?’ Arya asked; a sudden change in attitude transpiring between the words, as though she’d guessed the answer while asking the question.

‘ _I don’t want to talk about her_ ,’ Jaime growled; furious with himself and furious with Arya for making him spill his guts just by preaching to him.

‘ _As you like_ ,’ Arya snarled in reply, ‘and yes, it’s possible that thousands of people died tonight, and by my hand, _and I admit it_ , _I don’t ask forgiveness for it_ , but if I hadn’t done it, then the tens of thousands more people who would have died – _that_ would have been my fault –’

‘So that’s why you did it?’ Jaime asked brutally, ‘to save lives? Or to save your own precious conscience?’

When she didn’t reply, he finally turned his head to look at her, and all expression was fading, from her face and from her eyes. A realisation, or an instinct; some instinct-forming thing; was swallowing her and taking her away, and it was like she was dying in front of him; fading to black, fading to cold.

‘I’m a Faceless Man,’ Arya said matter-of-factly, ‘I don’t _have_ a conscience.’

She rolled onto her back before he could reply.

Jaime fixed his eyes on her, and watched her. She was lying with her eyes closed, and breathing deeply, as though trying to control herself. Her eyelids were heavy, with a white transparency about them that made them look almost luminous in the half light, and her eyelashes were long and impossibly delicate; fragile and brittle-looking as they whispered tenderly against her skin…

‘If you have no conscience,’ Jaime asked loudly, ‘then why are we having this conversation?’

‘I don’t know; I don’t care; forget I said anything,’ Arya drawled, as though the subject no longer held any interest for her.

‘Even the bit about liking the mosaic?’ Jaime insisted sardonically.

‘I don’t need to be human to like the mosaic,’ she replied.

That made Jaime smile at first. He’d been manipulated so many times in the course of his life that the thought of this slip of a girl being arrogant enough to give it a go, and merely in the name of getting him to apologise, amused him greatly. Nevertheless, there was an indifference in her manner of expressing herself that wasn’t quite–

‘I can’t fathom why you’re so convinced of not being human, Lady Stark,’ he chortled.

‘ _You_ don’t think I’m human,’ she stated uncaringly.

And once again his first instinct was that she was manipulating him, though he’d never had cause to expect that from her… and once again there was something in her voice that made him hesitate; that made him think that he might not be quite…

It was the _way_ that she had said it – ‘ _you don’t think I'm human,_ ’ – as though she were making a cold, emotionless statement of fact on a subject about which she cared too little to lie…and now that he _realised_ it, it became intolerable. The very idea of having heard those words in her mouth, in that tone, was…horrifying; just as bad, if not worse, as the first time that she had indifferently declared her inhumanity; in the Kingswood, lying tucked away in his arms with her voice about to break beneath the weight of the fact that it wasn’t true; that she wouldn’t have been talking this way if it were true –

‘I _do_ think you’re human,’ Jaime told her, with an earnestness that mortified him.

Arya turned her head and looked mockingly at him with an eerily tranquil air of maddeningly conceited superiority that clearly announced a total lack of interest in his opinion and a general disinclination to say another word.

The rage that shot through him in that moment almost made him choke.

‘What?’ Jaime snapped, propping himself up on one elbow and facing her, ‘what is that? What’s that look? Is that supposed to frighten me, unnerve me, make me say differently, make me think I’m wrong? Well I apologise, Lady Stark, but if your ridiculous posturing had anything resembling an effect on me, and made me yield to it and agree with you, I’d be lying through my fucking teeth. Because no matter how cold and calculating and oh-so-fucking Faceless you think you are; you were human when I met you, you’re human now, you were human back there when I fell apart like some simple little squire, and you were human when you told me about Jaqen. Or was that all an act? Were you just _pretending_?’

She continued to stare coldly at him; her face like a blank slate; her lips sealed shut.

‘Were you pretending when you kissed me?’ Jaime demanded.

Arya continued to stare detachedly at him; as though he were some idiot who’d just asked her to recite the alphabet.

Then something in her changed. At first, he couldn’t tell what it was. But then the smallest trace of colour began to creep back into the impassive marble of her cheeks: an elusive, unremarkable shade of pink, then a veritable blaze of Lannister crimson, and just as Jaime realised that Arya Stark was blushing like a maiden, life roared into her eyes like an inferno and turned their grey mist to iron, and she gasped suddenly and wildly for breath as though they’d been fucking rather than talking. She laid her head back against the floor and took several deep breaths, before turning her head to face him, ignoring the baffled look on his face, and steadfastly declaring:

‘ _You_ kissed _me_.’

‘Me?’ Jaime countered, ‘I most certainly did not.’

‘Well it definitely wasn’t _me_ ,’ Arya insisted.

Jaime snorted with laughter, but said nothing.

Arya smiled at him, first with her eyes, then with her lips; a small smile, and sad.

 _She’s distressed_.

‘No,’ she said.

‘No, what?’ Jaime murmured.

‘I wasn’t pretending,’ she murmured back.

She was looking at him so strangely: without expectation; without happiness; without any…asking…but there was a kind of sheen in her eyes when she did so; a kind of rain; that was new, and…indescribable. Her eyes were becoming a mirror; they were making him look back at himself; and for the first time since the end of the conquest, he didn’t think to avoid his own reflection, because she was looking at him as though he weren’t some broken shell of a cripple with a scarred face and a ruined body, but a man.

Jaime reached out and gently tucked a flagrant wisp of hair behind Arya’s ear; his fingers brushing her forehead, her temple, her cheek. Her hand covered his and held it there; her skin warm, her palms calloused; and her eyes closed as their fingers laced together and held each other tightly, and it was…good; this; whatever it was.

‘If I’d known I was interrupting, I would have taken a longer route!’ a voice called out; its tones echoing luridly throughout the chamber.

Arya was on her feet like a slingshot; sword and dagger at the ready; her eyes fixed on the tunnel entrances at the far end of the chamber. Jaime stood with far more care, and did not draw his sword; his heart beating wildly as a dark shape collapsed out of the central tunnel and into the shadows; and memory and hope were crashing into his mind and blinding him; and reason telling them to be still.

‘Reveal yourself!’ Arya commanded.

The shape stumbled out of the shadows, covered in dirt and cobwebs and worse, and Jaime felt relief blazing through his veins, and weakness welling up in his eyes as the light fell on slight stature, mismatched eyes and spectacular sense of humour alike.

‘Will you stop being so _serious_ ; it’s making my head ache,’ Tyrion groaned, ‘have you got any wine?’


	15. Chapter 15

Arya crawled alone through the second set of tunnels; her mind rushing in to fill the silence and the dark. She had left Tyrion and Jaime in the dragon chamber; glowering at each other like a couple of two year olds. She fervently hoped that the glowering would eventually translate into an argument of some kind. Arguing was a far better thing than not talking at all.

When Tyrion had emerged from the tunnel, alive, exhausted and insufferable, Arya had run across the chamber, plummeted to her knees and seized him in a bone-crushing hug (which had naturally prompted the little man to enquire if she was drunk or unwell). Jaime, on the other hand, had stood riveted to the spot like a gargoyle, unable to move or speak as Tyrion had asked a thousand frantic questions about Daenerys, and whether or not she had escaped.

Arya, observing from Tyrion’s body language that telling him the truth would do him far more harm than good, had patiently provided him with a thousand, identical and perfectly untrue assurances that Daenerys’ injury did not pose a significant threat to her life, and that she would recover quickly. And still Jaime had said nothing, and still Tyrion had not done so much as look at him; acting as though Arya were the only person in the room as she pressed him to tell the story of his own escape.

When the fighting had started (Tyrion had been throwing up in a flowerbed at the time), he had torn back to the great hall immediately; fearing that some evil had befallen Daenerys. Having ascertained that the queen was nowhere to be seen, he had then made a combined use of his height and his knowledge of the Red Keep’s secret passageways to seek her in the great hall’s immediate surrounds. No sooner had the situation rendered him confident enough to reasonably conclude that she had escaped, however, that his luck had run out, and he had been chased all the way to the Tower of the Hand by a group of drunken Northerners, who had mercifully decided to put his miraculous disappearance within the confines of his own bedchamber down to sorcery, and had investigated no further.

The whole story had pained Arya, not because of its content, but because Tyrion and Jaime had not looked at each other once in the telling of it, and when she had finally put her foot down and forced the two idiots to greet each other, they had done so as strangers: formally and grudgingly; like two lordlings of opposing tastes forced to play together while their parents were visiting.

Arya’s mind had then turned to their own escape, and she had determined to go out alone into the city, and establish which alliances and allegiances had changed overnight.

‘One of my masters has a house here,’ she had told Jaime and Tyrion, ‘I’m bound by honour code to report once a month on the king and queen’s secrets, and on anything else of interest I might hear.’

‘ _What_ did you say?’ Tyrion had sharply interrupted.

‘My master will be able to tell me exactly where things stand,’ Arya had continued, ignoring him, ‘ _without_ any crying or hysterical embellishment, both of which I’d have to take into account if I simply went to a tavern. He might even help us, if I can convince him there’d be something in it for him.’

‘Gods be good, you’re a fucking  _spy_!’ Tyrion had exclaimed, looking crestfallen.

‘Well what the fuck else did you imagine I was doing on the Kingsguard?’ Arya had asked, deeply surprised, and a little annoyed, that Tyrion hadn’t surmised as much the moment she had arrived in Meereen.

‘I know of no Faceless Man elder in King’s Landing,’ Tyrion had stubbornly persisted.

‘There are too many of us in the capital for there not to be an elder in permanent residence,’ Arya had replied, ‘it’s hardly our fault you lot never pay attention.’

‘There are  _how many_  – but – but – does Varys know about this?’

‘Not as far as I know.’

Jaime, who had remained silent till then, had chosen that moment to interject with even more stupidity.

‘Surely you don’t expect me to let you go  _alone_ ,’ he had retorted.

‘Surely you don’t expect me to let you come  _along_ ,’ she had drawled, in as annoying a manner as she could muster.

‘ _Arya!_ ’

‘ _Jaime.’_

‘Can you…will you… will you  _at least_  tell us where to look if you don’t come back?’

Arya had changed her face at that; hoping it would destroy all evidence of the warmth rising in her chest, and as she had felt the mask spreading over her face; her features disappearing beneath those of a beautiful Volantine girl who had come to the House of Black and White long ago to die, she had grinned wickedly at Jaime and Tyrion; both of whom had blanched and stared in horror. She had turned away from them, then, and had re-entered the tunnels on her hands and knees; and as the light, the earth, the sound, told her where to go; she had fervently hoped that her face, at least, would give the two idiots something to talk about.

Daylight was glowing ahead of her now, and the smell of smoke rushing through the tunnel mouth to meet her, and she quickened her pace and scrambled ahead; the light and the smell, drawing ever closer.

She emerged from the tunnel into a morning desolate with ash and dust. Ruins rose burning and smoking around her; empty shells of buildings; empty streets; a silence not of this world; a greyness. Smoke burned at her eyes, and choked up her throat…charred bodies littered the road; some curled up like children; some lifting their arms upwards as if in supplication…a child came dashing out of a nearby house and ran shrieking across the street before her, darting into the ruins on the opposite side and disappearing; its face so horrifically burned, so hairless, so black, so red, that it might have been a boy or a girl, and her Facelessness did not rise up to tell her which. She could hear people screaming nearby…for help, for pain, or because there was nothing else to do... and the devastation went on as far as the eye could see. Her devastation.

Arya tried, and failed, to suspend her guilt somewhere within herself; to look at it later and not let it affect her now. Now, she needed to calm herself, and to be presentable and unassuming for her meeting with her master.

But she could not be calm. She could not put her feelings in a box and lock them away. But unless she succeeded in getting herself firmly and immediately under control, her master would know it the moment he saw her, and  _then_ she’d be caught in a shitstorm of note.

 _It is of little matter_ , she thought,  _at least now I may tell him where No one has gone, and not have to risk lying to him._

It would be a despicable lie, of course. A selfish one. But that would not stop her from telling it. Because for the past month, the longest month of her life, a state of fear, worry, panic and anger at herself had lingered constantly in her mind and in her vision each time she closed her eyes. Because minute by minute, second by second, ever since some ridiculous five-minute-long conversation on a balcony on the night of her welcoming feast, her Facelessness had been dying; slowly at first, imperceptibly, then faster and faster, in larger and more frightening chunks of serenity, cold-bloodedness and peace of mind.

She had not seen her master since it had started, and she feared what he would do when he saw her. Because  _this_  was nothing like what had happened when Daenerys had tried to wake her up: mood swings, tantrums, flashbacks, nightmares, demons in her head that could come screaming and scratching out of her at the sound of a particular word or the potency of a particular smell. Her master had seen her many times after that occurrence, and had found it extremely funny. But  _this_ …he would punish her if he saw this; if she did not lie well enough about what to her felt like going blind and deaf at the same time while the huge energy of mind that usually went into constant calculation and observation diverted into other,  _stupid_ places that it shouldn’t be frequenting at all.

Arya snorted to herself and wondered why she had used the word ‘places’ when she could simply have said ‘Jaime.’ After everything that she had seen and felt and experienced…after everything she  _hadn’t_ …after everything that she had worked for, it was almost unjust that this insanity was happening to her at the hands of a madly-irritating, intensely-arrogant, utterly charmless  _shit_ , who was a  _Lannister_ to boot, and who…Bran… _gods_ …but who was, and who might just be…the truest friend she…

Except he wasn’t her  _friend_ , and she didn’t want him to be. Too much had happened for them to be stupid  _friends._  But  _nothing_  had happened…much…and yet ever since that first time at the feast…when she had reached out and touched him…an invisible, limitlessly powerful thing, made of iron and fire, had existed in the space between her and him; burning No one to cinders over a slow, beautiful flame that never went out. And underground, in the chamber with the ladder, when Jaime had helped her stitch up her arm, the iron and the fire had taken hold of her Facelessness and had strangled it completely; she had felt it die just as she had felt the heat of Jaime’s skin through each strip of shirt he had used to mop up her blood, and just as she had known that he could feel the heat of hers…embarrassing, stupid…and tiny, absurd things that didn’t mean anything had crowded in on her senses and drowned them: the way he winced each time she stuck the pin into her arm; the way he ignored it when his hair fell into his eyes; the scars on his neck and the way they would change in the light…and whatever this thing in the space between them was, it was terrible, and painful, and…good…because being near him hurt, and looking at him hurt, but it hurt in the best way there was; the Someone way…and then he had made her angry; and No one had come back to life and nearly killed him. And as she had held him against her, alive, she had wanted to scream and cry in terror at what she had almost done…and at how her own stupid sentimentality had let it happen.

_Facelessness never dies, you stupid little girl. The Red God takes what is his, and nothing will deny him his wish._

And yet No one had never been all of her; never, not even after Jaqen died. She had been No one…with an empty space; a space that Daenerys had filled two years ago; and though Someone  _had_  been born again, it had only been as a little ghost, who came ripping out of Arya’s soul when rage did; leaving her to serenity and to the cold for most of her waking life.

But with him…with Jaime…it was the other way round; No one sometimes, Someone all the time… and she loved it: arguing with him, laughing with him, the feeling of his arms around her, the heat of his mouth as it pressed hungrily into hers, and the way his emerald gaze always seemed to understand what she could not put into words.

It was terrifying. How could she be Queensguard…and live for nothing and for no one but her queen, and…be this way? Who would she save if she had to choose between them? Who would she kill should she someday  _stand_  between them with a sword in her hand?

What would happen if she turned into a ruthless, cold-blooded killer every time Jaime decided to be a jackass? What if she killed him by mistake?

Arya paused where she was and put her hands on her knees; inhaling the smell of burning stone, burning flesh, burning air –

_What if I kill him? What if I kill him? What if I kill him? What if I kill him?_

She breathed deeply, and thought back to the men she had killed the previous night; how she had stood behind them as though from atop a glacier, her hands steady, her heart silent. She invoked the fields of emptiness within her and tried to gaze across them; summoning Facelessness to her; calling upon it to bring her peace; to descend across her eyes and protect her when she came before her master.

 _King’s Landing the Grey, King’s Landing the Burned. If he notices, then_ this  _is why you have lost yourself. This, and nothing else._

‘Who are you…No one…who are you…’ she murmured to herself.

A shadow fell across the stones in front of her; a shadow where there was no sun.

‘ _Valar morghulis_ , Servant,’ a gentle voice said.

Arya straightened up immediately; her heart lurching as she faced the man in white.

‘ _Valar dohaeris_ , Master,’ she replied, bowing,  _what the fuck is he doing out of his house?_

‘Servant, you are unwell?’ the man in white asked her.

‘Yes, Master,’ she responded.

The man in white gazed calmly at her.

‘Perhaps this explains why you have misunderstood the meaning of ‘tell no one,’ in the matter of Master H’ghar.’

Arya ran. The world turned black. Her limbs turned to water. And to any person passing by, she seemed nothing more than a beautiful girl, fainting in the arms of a man in white.

 

* * *

 

 

 

‘ _You_ like her,’ Tyrion smirked, from his place beside Jaime in the dragon chamber; breaking a silence that had gone on forever.

‘ _You’re_ completely mad,’ Jaime replied; wondering if Arya would notice if he immediately retreated to the opposite end of the room.

Tyrion’s grin widened.

In the past, Jaime might have grinned with him; even when he himself was the butt of whichever joke his brother was no doubt about to make. But there was a malice in the way Tyrion was smiling at him that was so utterly uncharacteristic that Jaime could do little more than stare, and try to end the conversation as quickly as possible.

Tyrion cleared his throat theatrically.

‘I was watching you when she mentioned leaving alone –’

‘You were looking at me, and now you’re  _talking_  to me? Has winter come already?’

‘– and you turned white, brother.  _White_.’

Jaime bit his tongue, smothered his own discomfort, and did not reply. His brother had never been spiteful before.

_Did I do that to him?_

‘I might even have done you the courtesy of laughing at you were it not so pathetic,’ Tyrion sneered.

‘Will you  _please_ be quiet?’ Jaime snapped.

Tyrion smirked triumphantly.

‘How old are you, brother? Five-and-forty?’

‘You keep track of my namedays? I’m touched.’

‘Well whatever your age, I’m amazed at your stupidity. Beautiful young girls don’t fuck broken old men unless they’re paid.’

‘Only you would know.’

‘And then there’s the matter of her brother, and her father, and your trying to kill her when she was a girl, and – shall I continue?’

‘Only if your intention is to make me fall asleep.’

‘Gods, you really  _are_  pathetic.’

‘At least I can stand to be told the truth, which is more than I can say for you.’

Jaime instantly regretted his words as all the colour drained from Tyrion’s face; mockery and spite replaced by hatred and disbelief, and worst of all, heartache.

‘Ah, yes,’ Tyrion said softly, ‘ _the truth._ The truth that was meant to set  _you_  free.’

Jaime looked at him in silence; the truth and the untruth of those words binding him with ropes made of guilt and self-loathing and despair.

‘Tell me,’ Tyrion continued, in a disconcertingly pleasant voice, ‘what did you think would happen when you told me  _the truth_  about Tysha? Did you think I would thank you for it?’

Jaime tried to reply.

‘No, but –’

‘Why didn’t you tell me the truth from the beginning?’ Tyrion snarled abruptly, ‘from the  _moment_ I walked into that fucking hall and found you and Father together? Why did you lie?’

‘Father told me –’

‘Do not  _talk to me_  about Father, Jaime!’ Tyrion shouted; his face an agony, ‘ _Father_ changes nothing. I was a miserable, terrified little  _child_  –’

‘I know,’ Jaime murmured.

‘ _You_ were a  _man grown_ ; you had your own life –’

‘My own –  _are you mad?_ ’

‘You could have told him you would have no part in it; you could have _refused_  –’

‘The same way you refused to fuck the girl when everyone else was done with her?’

Tyrion struck him hard in the face. It hurt, but not as much as his brother’s eyes did; their black, their green, like gateways to the seven hells.

‘Tyrion,’ Jaime said, forcing himself to look at his brother, ‘no Lannister had his own life when Father was still –’

‘ _Don’t_  – you fucking dare,’ Tyrion growled.

There was an agony of a silence; punctuated only by the torches crackling in their sconces, and the sound of Jaime trying not to talk.

Tyrion stared hard at the dragon mosaic; as though he’d never seen anything more fascinating; his face screwing up in concentration; his voice steady and unbroken when he addressed his brother once again.

‘I spent…my whole life…wanting to be you. My tall handsome brother; admired by all the world; a knight straight from a song… _and my brother_.  _Mine…_ I didn’t blame you. Not for Tysha, not for myself. If anything, the whole fucking mess only made me love you more. Why did you decide to tell me the truth after hiding it for so long?  _Why_?’

‘What else should I have done?’ Jaime asked quietly.

Tyrion looked at him.

‘You should have stayed away and let me die.’

‘Tyrion –’

‘Don’t.’

They were spared the pain of another tortured silence by the sound of scratching, scrambling and complaining as Arya emerged from one of the tunnels, clutching two saddlebags that she had somehow managed to drag along with her.

‘Lions of the Rock, I bring food and wine!’ Arya roared, and immediately began to cast about for a place to put the saddlebags; scurrying rapidly in one direction, changing her mind, scuttling back the way she had come, changing her mind and changing it again, pacing, pacing, pacing, dancing with indecision and babbling all the while; and Jaime was getting to his feet in horror, and Tyrion beside him doing the same, as he saw that her doublet was completely undone, her eyes huge and black, and her body…and her mind…

‘There’ll be horses waiting for us outside the city  _tonight_ ,’ Arya jabbered, walking from left to right and back again across a distance of four feet, ‘so we can go  _anywhere_ , Lannister brothers, but not till tonight.’

Jaime stared at her; unable to move; unable to think; wanting to help her…but frozen…but stopped…She was pacing madly up and down as Aerys had done at the end, trapped within herself like an animal, and pacing, pacing, pacing, as she began to look for something in one of the saddle bags, which she still carried on her shoulders.

‘Aegon is in league with Sansa!’ Arya sang,  _pace, pace, pace, look, look, look,_  ‘she gets her men to orchestrate the wedding massacre and make it look like Daenerys died while caught in the crossfire; the black cloaks go after Jaime and make her a widow again, just because; Aegon frees the North and lets Sansa’s son take the Stark name. Brilliant!  _AHA!_ ’

She ripped a wine bottle from one of the sacks and threw it to Tyrion; laughed uproariously when the force of the throw knocked him over; deposited the bags on the floor in front of her with a crash; and continued to pace, and speak; throwing her hands up in the air and twiddling her fingers expressively.

‘The wedding massacre and the queen’s death cause widespread panic and increased tension across  _all_ Westeros, if that’s possible,’ she continued,  _pace, pace, pace,_  ‘darling King Aegon steps in to resolve said tension all by himself; [ _pace, pace, pace_ ] everybody loves him! Brilliant!’

Jaime walked slowly towards her.

‘There’s no proof, of course,’ she said,  _pace, pace, pace,_  ‘ _nothing_ ; just deductions and whisperings; anyone would think it was entirely Sansa’s doing if  _they_ and  _we_ didn’t know better.’

‘Arya, what’s happened to you?’ Jaime asked; his voice so soft he could scarcely hear himself speaking.

‘Nothing at all!’ came the reply,  _pace, pace, pace,_  ‘I’m fit as a fiddle and ready to die all over again!’

‘Arya – stop doing that,’ Jaime said, gently touching her shoulder and trying to make her stop pacing.

She hit him so hard the blow almost knocked him over.

‘ _Don’t touch me!_ ’ she screamed.

She resumed pacing, seriously and intently, as though the world would come to an end were she not permitted to walk to and fro; and when Jaime tried, once again, to make her stop…

It was as if she had lost her mind.

She fought like a demon; struggling, shrieking, scratching, kicking, screaming, as Jaime seized her by the shoulders, and then around the waist; her ears deaf to every word he said to calm her. She tried to claw his eyes out; she tried to bite him; everything about the way she fought savage; primal, as though all that she was had been shocked out of her. Every plea that she be calm only had the opposite effect; and her screams were hurting him; killing him; her screams, and the thought of what she might do to herself if he let her go.

She elbowed him hard in the stomach and burst from his grip; making his heart lurch and stagger in his chest, and she dashed to the far end of the chamber and turned to face him; her face ashen and wide-eyed and alert; too alert; a mask of terror and desolation. He took a step towards her. She took a step back.

Jaime jumped as Tyrion’s voice abruptly interjected from somewhere to his left.

‘Show her that you’re not going to hurt her.’

Jaime unbuckled his sword belt and let it drop to the floor; making Arya jump, and stare at him. Then he showed her the palms of his hands, because he couldn’t think of anything else to do, and immediately felt like an idiot. A golden hand was not much use in winning the confidence of a person who was out of her fucking mind.

But as Arya gazed intently at Jaime’s hands; her entire head glancing frenetically from left to right and left again and right again; she did not seem to stare at the golden hand for any longer period of time than she did at its flesh-and-blood counterpart. The thought made him smile affectionately, in spite of himself. She was just as careless when in full command of her senses.

Arya was moving uncertainly from one foot to the next, and breathing deeply and hard, and as Jaime slowly began to approach her, she started to hum tunelessly; as though singing herself to sleep. She kept her eyes fixed on him as she hummed, and side-stepped, and the closer he came, the more terrified she seemed, though…

 _Not of me_ , he realised, _it isn’t me she fears_.

‘Don’t touch me,’ Arya mumbled as he came to her.

‘I’m not touching you; I’m just putting my hand out,’ Jaime replied; stretching his left arm out in front of him; his palm facing her, ‘touch it, ignore it, I don’t much care. You choose.’

He took several steps back, and waited.

For a few minutes, Arya’s eyes seemed to blur; moving from Jaime, to the space around him, and back again. She moved several feet to the left, and then several to the right; humming all the while; keeping her eyes fixed on him; waiting for him to follow her. His arm was starting to cramp. He didn’t move.

Finally, she began to edge forward. She took tiny steps; every footstep imbued with the desire to run away again. He had never seen her look so small and frightened. He waited for her.

Her eyes were shining with tears by the time she put her hand out. She looked so, so frightened. He waited for her. She came closer.

Their fingertips touched. Arya’s fingers clutched his. Then somehow, her arms were around his neck, and she was whispering his name into his doublet as though she hadn’t said it in years, ‘Jaime. Jaime. Jaime,’ and he was holding her tightly and rocking her gently and thanking the gods she was alright; and when he looked at her, he realised that she was sobbing, and too exhausted, or too uncaring to pretend otherwise.

‘What have they done to you?’ Jaime whispered.

She shook her head frantically, on and on; stopping only when he held her to him again; and when her eyes slowly closed; as though with relief, he wanted to kiss her until she forgot what crying was.

‘Jaime, they’ve ruined my arm,’ Arya half-whispered, half-sobbed, ‘the one you helped me fix.’

Jaime froze; dread clutching at his heart and turning it to ash.

‘Let me see,’ he said.

‘ _No_ ,’ she sobbed; hysteria growling at the back of her throat again.

‘No, no, no, Arya, look at me,’ Jaime persisted; framing her face with his hands and looking into her eyes, ‘ _look at me_.’

‘I’m afraid,’ Arya whimpered.

‘I know,’ Jaime whispered.

‘They made me drink something,’ she continued softly; laying her head on his chest and tightening her grip around his neck, ‘…I saw things…’

Jaime felt his hand moving to stroke her hair, and his lips touching the boiling skin of her forehead; though he was fairly sure he had not intended to do either.

‘It’s alright, my love,’ he murmured softly, ‘you’re not there, with them. You’re here with me.’

He hadn’t intended to say that either.

Arya looked up at him. She had stopped crying. Her hand cupped his cheek and traced the lines of his face, and he felt sure, now, that she could feel his heart beating, faster than it should be, faster than he had ever intended it to be. Then her hand dropped, and she was mutely offering the end of her right sleeve to him; her left hand moving slowly to her collar.

Her face screwed up in pain as he helped her out of her doublet; the absence of her shirt making the leather stick to her skin. And when Jaime looked at her right arm, he saw that the wound they had sewn up together had all but disappeared; covered up by a precisely-executed but horrific burn that disfigured the skin from shoulder to elbow; as though a maester had been forced to cauterise the wound on the battlefield because he had run out of silk. As though a slaver had decided to brand her.

Jaime almost jumped at the sound of Tyrion gasping in horror. He had completely forgotten that his brother was there. And he forgot about him yet again as anger boiled out of his heart and took hold of the rest of his body like a fever.

‘ _Who?_ ’ Jaime growled.

Arya shook her head; tears forming in her eyes once again.

‘They know I told you about Jaqen. I don’t know how, but they know.’

‘ _I want names_ ,’ Jaime persisted.

‘They’ll kill you,’ Arya whispered, still shaking her head.

‘ _I don’t give a fuck if they kill me_ ,’ Jaime snarled,‘ _Who?_ ’

Arya’s entire body was trembling in pain, and her voice when she spoke was both small and fierce.

‘I do not need you to die for me; do you understand me?’ 


	16. Chapter 16

The fire was burning low and red; and bathing the room in a crimson glow. Aegon stared hard into the flames, whispering softly to himself that the flames were staring back, and as a soft _pad pad pad_ of footsteps behind his chair announced Varys’ arrival; Aegon felt tears forming in his eyes, and his skin trembling as it turned to ice.

‘Is it done?’ he asked.

‘Her patriarch assures me that she has been severely punished, Your Grace,’ Varys purred in reply.

Aegon closed his eyes; imprisoning the tears within them, and swallowing as relief invaded and ruined him. _Relief._

‘And why, when he was ‘severely punishing’ her, did he not devote a split second to heeding my royal command and cutting her throat?’ Aegon demanded, turning slowly in his chair to face his Master of Whisperers.

Varys bowed deeply.

‘He tells me that her services are too valuable to lose at this time, Your Grace.’

Noise, emotion, pandemonium, anger burst into Aegon’s mind and ruptured it; burning and shrieking as he turned back to the fire and tried to collect his thoughts. But his thoughts were running away with him, bursting into flame and lighting up the corners of him, the worst corners; the ones that should never be lighted. But she wasn’t dead and he had wanted her dead, he had feared that she was dead, he had cried that she was dead, _WHY THE FUCK WASN’T SHE DEAD_ , and he was leaping to his feet and throwing his wine glass against the wall while Varys stood calm and tranquil as though the whole fucking world wasn’t about to end.

‘Her _services_ are too _valuable?_ ’ Aegon thundered,‘ _I have Seven Kingdoms to rule!!!_ I have a peace to keep; loyalties that I must command _absolutely_ if I am to keep _Westeros from descending into total fucking chaos!!!_ So when one of my own Kingsguard knowingly assists my _wife_ and _queen_ in rebelling against the throne, incites two of her brothers to follow her, and shows a compulsive inability to keep her mouth off Jaime Lannister’s cock, then the need to preserve the rule of law by _slaughtering_ the bitch far outweighs any interest I might have in helping those Faceless shits preserve whatever _services_ she performs!’

‘An excellent speech, Your Grace,’ Varys replied, ‘if I might suggest that you spare it for court tomorrow.’

Varys squealed as the king seized him by the throat with one hand and drew his dagger with the other; pressing its tip to Varys’ throat and toying with the idea of cutting him. And though Aegon knew full well that assigning blame to his bitch queen or to her little Northern cunt of a Queensguard in front of one of his own co-conspirators was preposterous; that Varys knew, as well as he did, that he would be the sole ruler in Westeros by now had the dagger simply hit Daenerys’ throat instead of her thigh, he found the sound of the blade as it glided furiously and lazily across the eunuch’s throat immensely enjoyable.

‘Your Grace, please, I cannot draw breath,’ Varys was gagging in a sweetly high-pitched voice.

The eunuch’s tone made Aegon laugh, and release him; and he chuckled as Varys gasped for breath and flapped his arms like a bird in flight, as though doing so would help him to breathe faster. Aegon crossed the room to the table to pour himself more wine, and watched as the bird ceased to fly, and continued to speak as though nothing had happened.

‘Lady Sansa, Your Grace, continues to assure me that the man charged with ending the queen’s life was her best knifeman.’

Aegon snorted in derision, then paused.

‘ _Was?_ ’

‘I heard a song detailing a particularly unpleasant private disembowelment in her chambers earlier this evening,’ Varys tittered.

‘Let Lady Sansa kill whom she likes if it prevents her from contemplating other mischief,’ Aegon replied; swallowing the wine and almost retching it up again as he felt his anger claw back towards him, ‘did the Faceless Men also see fit to disobey my command that they provide us with information as to the manner of Lady Stark’s escape?’

‘Yes, Your Grace,’ Varys replied.

‘So we have no idea where she is, with whom or in what condition,’ Aegon ventured; suppressing the desire to scream, with difficulty.

‘Dragonstone seems the logical destination,’ Varys concluded, ‘if Her Grace – that is, if Princess Daenerys does indeed stake her claim to the throne from there.’

‘ _She is no good to me in Dragonstone_ ,’ Aegon growled.

‘My little birds will find her,’ Varys simpered, prudently omitting to ask if the ‘she’ he should seek was Arya or Daenerys, and paying no attention as Aegon breathed deeply through the nose and forced himself to be calm.

It was harder than it had ever been before.

 _The fits come quicker now. And worse. Soon, they will take me. They will_ not _take me._

‘Do you have anything else to report before I retire for the night?’ Aegon asked, in a level voice.

‘The acolytes should arrive from Oldtown tomorrow, to assist with the wounded,’ Varys told him.

‘Good,’ Aegon nodded, ‘that was one of my better ideas.’

‘There has also been a large influx of maesters from most of the Crownlands, and even the Stormlands, for the same purpose,’ Varys went on; ‘the city is quite overcome with goodwill.’

‘See that these bringers of goodwill are properly supplied and lodged, and put a guard on all medicinal supplies. I want no camping out in brothels or unscrupulous trade in milk of the poppy.’

‘With what coin am I to do this, Your Grace?’

Aegon sighed aloud.

_When I meet Cersei Lannister in hell, I’ll kill her again._

‘Obtain a list of this year’s balls, feasts and tourneys from my steward,’ Aegon commanded, ‘eliminate as many as you need to.’

Varys bowed, and turned to leave.

‘Stay,’ Aegon called.

‘Your Grace?’ Varys replied.

‘Don’t cancel the tourneys. The people crave distractions; and if we don’t provide them, they will create their own.’


	17. Chapter 17

Arya had started drinking almost as soon as the horses and provisions promised by those Faceless bastards had turned up at the appointed place outside the city walls. She had paid absolutely no attention to Jaime’s well-intentioned but transparent comments on the dangers of fighting when intoxicated, and by the time that they had somewhat unwisely stopped for the night (on their way to a smuggler’s alcove at the outer edge of Blackwater Bay, which she claimed would get them to Dragonstone), she was drunker than a Pentoshi wine merchant, and Tyrion with her.

Jaime, determined that at least one member of their party would stay sober despite the manifold attractions of being the opposite, sat glowering at the pair of them as they enthusiastically commenced the playing of a bizarre Braavosi knife game that seemed to involve throwing knives at a tree, collapsing into fits of laughter no matter what the result, and drinking deeply each time someone missed. Since Tyrion made a point of missing deliberately (and of adding to the general hilarity by falling over whenever he did so), they were soon beyond the reach of any pleas for quiet or discretion, and when Arya came tottering over to Jaime, clutching an extra wine bottle and thrusting it into his face with a wide-eyed, pleading insistence that was utterly disarming, he rolled his eyes and accepted it, despite his best intentions.

The wine blazed through his body like molten gold, sharpening and numbing his senses at the same time, and everything in the world became golden, and fascinating, and enduringly hilarious: as though the sight of Tyrion falling to the floor would never be less funny; as though the sound of Arya laughing would never be less beautiful. It was like being drunk for the first time – and having no idea of what came afterwards.

At the present moment, Jaime was propped up on his elbows opposite Tyrion, staring intently into the tiny fire that they had made, while Arya, reclining beside Jaime on her left arm, seemed to be trying to do the same thing with her eyes half-shut; her entire face screwed up in concentration, like a child trying to remember her words and sigils.

Jaime declared with disappointment that he saw nothing in the flames; Arya grumbled that no one had told her what to look for in the flames in the first place; Tyrion snorted with laughter and stated that he had completely forgotten what he had seen in the flames, and

‘Ooh!’ Arya cried; almost knocking Jaime unconscious as she abruptly raised her wine bottle, ‘wait! I remember! It was Aegon. You said we were supposed to be looking for Aegon.’

Jaime blinked at her in confusion, thought her exceedingly pretty when she was drunk (it made her so much more pink), and protested that they could not be looking for Aegon, because he had never seen Aegon’s beady little eyes at the bottom of _any_ fire, any _where_. Arya poked him rudely in the chest with her little finger and insisted that _she_ had seen Aegon’s beady little eyes at the bottom of _many_ fires in _many_ places, because whenever she pictured burning the king alive; his beady little eyeballs were always the last things to melt.

And Jaime was laughing uproariously and insisting that Arya provide proof, and Arya was scrambling noisily into a sitting position and pulling her knees to her chin, and Tyrion was ignoring her and insisting that he had indeed seen Aegon in the flames, ‘I’m _positive_ I saw him!’ he sulked; and Arya was balancing a wine bottle crown on her head and elegantly placing her elbows on her knees, and disdainfully regarding Jaime and Tyrion from the proverbial ‘on high’ of her own Iron Throne, and roaring ‘You _did_ see me, you impudent rascal!’ in such a frighteningly-accurate imitation of Aegon that Jaime almost forgot to laugh.

‘Your Grace!’ Tyrion squeaked; his mismatched eyes widening in terror, ‘I throw myself utterly upon your mercy, but if I must die, then I beg you to feed me to Rhaegal: he is looking so very thin nowadays that I fear Drogon has been helping himself to the poor dear’s victuals –’

‘Silence!’ Arya thundered; her ‘crown’ not falling off her head as she inclined it with proper Targaryen conceit, ‘let us cleave to the matter at hand. My lord Hand, for the past three months, I have consistently been served Dornish red with my lamprey pie, when I have made it eminently clear to you on multiple occasions that the combination of the two makes me sick to my stomach.’

‘My deepest apologies, Your Grace,’ Tyrion grovelingly responded, bowing to her, ‘I shall find the wretch responsible for this outrage and bring you his head!’

Arya’s face went red.

‘You _always_ say that and yet _nothing_ is ever _done_ about it; _must I burn my own fucking cook alive in order to be served Arbour gold with my fucking lamprey pie???_ ’ she bellowed.

Tyrion fell flat on his face.

‘Mercy, Your Grace; mercy for your cook, Your Grace; he has a wife, three mistresses and eleven bastard children –’

‘You have not considered, Your Grace,’ Jaime interjected, taking a swig of wine, ‘that the Hand of the King may be attempting to poison you by paying such scant attention to your diet.’

‘ _What???_ ’ Arya roared; her fingers clutching at the arms of her ugly iron chair.

‘Either that, or he just doesn’t give a fuck about lamprey pie,’ Jaime shrugged.

‘Off with his head!’ Arya shrieked, ‘let the King’s Justice carry out the sentence!’

‘Queen Daenerys abolished the office of the King’s Justice, Your Grace!’ Tyrion whimpered, ‘I fucked her handsomely for three weeks straight, but she could not be dissuaded –’

‘Off with his _head!_ ’ Arya insisted; bobbing up and down like a child having a tantrum.

‘Off with whose head?’ Jaime asked; confused.

‘She means yours, dear brother,’ Tyrion told him earnestly; patting the top of Jaime’s head.

‘She _does_?’ Jaime lamented, crestfallen.

‘She can’t mean mine,’ Tyrion assured him, ‘there’s more _in_ mine than yours.’

‘Dear brother, you _wound_ me!’ Jaime cried; tears forming in his eyes.

‘Apologies, dear brother,’ Tyrion replied; kissing both Jaime’s cheeks and starting to cry himself, ‘I’ll never wound you again.’

Arya cleared her throat and called their attention back to the fact that they had not yet appeased the Dragon for waking him from his slumbers.

‘I will pardon you, my lord Hand,’ she declared, ‘if you indulge my imperial munificence with a game and let me win.’

“ _I’m right, you drink; I’m wrong, I drink?_ ” Tyrion proposed.

‘ _I am in no mood for cyvasse; is this not immediately apparent?_ ’ Arya screeched.

‘Yes!’ Tyrion whooped.

‘No,’ Jaime groaned; burying his face in the dirt; _has he_ still _not tired of this fucking game?_

‘I command you to begin at once!’ Arya roared, ‘or I will take what is mine, with fire and blood!’

Tyrion hesitated; confusion spreading across his face.

‘But – do I pose questions to Arya or Aegon, Your Grace?’

‘ _Does the Lady Stark habitually wear a crown, you insolent wretch_?’

‘Why yes, Your Grace. In your dreams, she wears a crown and nothing else.’

‘ _Dracarys!_ ’

Jaime choked on both wine and laughter as Arya threw herself at Tyrion and set about attempting to strangle him for his insolence; her wine bottle falling to the ground and smashing as Tyrion’s little legs kicked in protest; his voice alternating between begging theatrically for mercy and attempting to stifle his own laughter; and it was with considerable regret that Jaime was eventually obliged to stand up, seize Arya by the collar and pull her off his brother; her chortling suggesting that she was enjoying herself a little too much.

‘Don’t get lost in the part,’ he drunkenly insisted; pointing an adamant finger at Arya as he released her.

Arya responded by jauntily confiscating Jaime’s wine bottle and sauntering back to her place by the fire; sitting eye-to-eye with Tyrion and glaring into his eyes as though they had not played this same ridiculous game a thousand times in Braavos: as though Tyrion hadn’t lost this same ridiculous game a thousand times in Braavos.

‘I’ll go first!’ Tyrion sweepingly declared, ‘and I will ask _Arya_ questions.’

Arya glared at him and pursed her lips in sullen disappointment. Jaime rather wanted to kiss her lips. The sheer childishness of her anger was adorable.

 _I should get drunk more often_ , he thought; plonking himself down next to them as Tyrion began the game, _absolutely everything becomes charming._

‘ _You_ ,’ Tyrion declared, pointing gravely at Arya, ‘were a very lonely child.’

Arya’s eyes lit up like winter, her smile widened into a beguiling expression of utter mischief, and Jaime suddenly realised, with a shock that he couldn’t quite overcome, that she was…what was the word?

_Beautiful. She’s beautiful._

He was thunderstruck. Why had he never noticed it before? It was so obvious as to be almost banal. Her cheeks were gloriously flushed, her eyes large and bright and alive; the firelight was uncovering strands of copper in her dark hair and dancing in them; and she looked very young and very happy…simple things, but…

Arya’s gaze turned slowly to meet Jaime’s and silently answered his call. And there was no judgment in the way that she looked at him; no revulsion; no embarrassment. Her breath was coming hard and fast in her chest; like his heart was, and her lips were parting slowly, as they did whenever she made a particularly delicious kill.

She was beautiful as a naked flame. And looking back at Tyrion, and chuckling.

‘Drink,’ she smiled.

‘Fuck,’ Tyrion swore; glowering at her as he tilted his head back and downed a good half-bottle of wine without stopping.

By the time he had to pause for breath, Tyrion’s cheeks, nose and eyes had turned a particularly fine shade of Lannister crimson; and his words, when he decided to try his hand at a second question, were so beautifully slurred that Jaime began to laugh the moment his little brother began to speak.

‘Your _sithster_ ,’ Tyrion proclaimed, punching his chuckling brother in the shoulder without looking at him, and glaring at Arya as a snort of laughter escaped her, ‘was always the _golden child_ of the family; praished to the skiesh on a daily basis; never in trouble with Mother or Father or Septa; good at _embroidery_ and _singing_ and _dancing_ ; good at everything you hated –’

‘You’re right so far,’ Arya chuckled; reverentially raising her wine bottle, ‘don’t ruin it!’

‘Shut up!’ Tyrion barked, swaying slightly, ‘– she was – she was good at everything you hasted – hated – brother, I will skin you for your rudeness –’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jaime wheezed; trying to swallow his laughter and only succeeding in choking on it, ‘it’s just –’

‘– and though you loved her,’ Tyrion continued, turning to Arya once more, ‘though you loved her without ever wanting to bees her – _what is so funny?_ ’

‘Nothing, nothing,’ Arya insisted; tears of glee streaming from her eyes, ‘please continue!’

‘– you would sometimesh – _dream_ of what it would feel like to be showered in complimenths – _ths_ – _thsssss_ –  and – and good graces, even were it just for one day.’

‘What a shame,’ Arya declared pleasantly, ‘you’ve ruined it. Drink.’

Tyrion spat out a string of obscenities, seized his wine bottle as though it were a morning star and drank with an enthusiasm that was strongly suggestive of a desire to consume both the bottle’s contents and the glass it was made of.

Arya raucously cheered Tyrion on as he paid his dues for his guess about her sister; _I’m married to her sister,_ Jaime thought, _which is odd, all things considered_ ; and Tyrion was triumphantly raising the empty wine bottle above his head, and shouting at the top of his lungs:

‘I –’

He stopped.

He stumbled.

He hiccupped.

‘– win,’ he wheezed.

And he keeled over like a sack of potatoes and promptly passed out.

Jaime would later remember falling about laughing and descending into a state of such hysterical guffawing that it had felt as though his lungs were turning in on themselves. Arya, (in a similar condition) was bent over next to him, and was positively howling (both with laughter and at the moon); her right hand clutching at her stomach; her left covering her mouth as though afraid her intestines were about to spill out of it. Each time one of them managed to calm down, he or she only had to look at the other, and then at Tyrion, for the fits of hysterics to start all over again, but when Arya started to poke Tyrion in the side with her index finger, smiling and giggling all the while, Jaime found the laughter smothered abruptly in his chest by a quite unaccountable desire to make her stop at all costs.

‘ _Don’t_ do that,’ Jaime half-commanded, half-chuckled; trying to swat her hand away from his brother.

‘ _Why_ not?’ Arya grumbled; pouting childishly and raising her left hand above her head and out of his reach.

Jaime leaned forwards and clumsily touched his lips to hers, once; his heart racing at his own boldness. When she didn’t punch or stab him, he kissed her again; this time for a small eternity of a second longer, and when he pulled away from her the second time, her lips followed his like heat seeking a blade; a silent protest that was a universe in itself.

‘Arya –’ he mumbled.

She pulled him hard against her and tenderly brushed her lips with his; her teeth softly imprisoning his bottom lip and biting at it in the dark, and when he locked his arms around her back and held her there; the tip of his tongue nudging almost shyly at the gap between her lips; he felt her mouth curving upwards into a smile.

Her stomach muscles stiffened as his cock grew hard against her, and she snarled playfully at him as his tongue swept hungrily into the heat of her mouth; drawing it slowly between his lips and claiming it. She was crushing her mouth greedily to his and clutching the back of his neck in an impossible attempt to be closer; to kiss deeper; to feel more, and he was burning alive in the best way possible – no dragonfire, no pain, no melting flesh, just her: the taste of her, her smell, her heat; her tenderness and her ecstasy. And he couldn’t conceive of why they hadn’t done this again since the accident in the Kingswood; why they hadn’t done this all day, every day, forever; why he hadn’t handed the kicking, screaming little girl back to Ned bloody Stark all those years ago and asked for her hand on the spot. It would have been worth the look on his face. It would have been worth the wait.

His lips traced a line from her mouth to her neck and stroked languidly at the skin there; her pulse wild and hot against his mouth. She was burying her left hand in his hair and pulling it; her hips were moving slowly against his and making him gasp aloud, and she was whimpering now at the feeling of his teeth nipping the nape of her neck and his hips pressing hard into hers. His fingers ghosted quietly up her right arm to her shoulder; tracing circles against her clothing as they went, and suddenly she was crying out in pain, and Jaime with her, as her skin remembered, for the first time that evening, that it had caught fire and been burned in the worst way possible; in the way of steel and screaming. She was trembling violently and slumping weakly forward to lay her forehead against Jaime’s chest; she was trying not to scream; he could _hear_ her trying not to scream; and he was jabbering like an idiot and stepping away from her in fear; _I_ knew _I shouldn’t have had that_ fucking _wine…_

‘Seven gods, have I hurt you?’ he half-pleaded; half-demanded.

‘No,’ Arya mumbled in a level voice, tears of shock streaming down her face as she slowly flexed the fingers of her right hand and grimaced at the pain, ‘I put some lavender oil on it earlier; it already feels better –’

‘Don’t lie to me,’ he growled; starting to panic as her chalk-white face turned grey.

Arya poked his forehead with her index finger.

‘I’m _fine_ ,’ she drawled; wiping her streaming eyes; ‘if I was _un-fine_ , then I would have stopped _ages_ ago.’

‘I’m –’ Jaime stammered; still panicking; still furious with himself, and at a loss what to say, ‘I’m so sorry, Arya –’

She kissed him; silencing her own name and softly snuffing it out as she slowly slid her left arm around Jaime’s waist; her hand coming to rest in the small of his back.

‘Don’t be sorry,’ she whispered, ‘I’m not.’


	18. Chapter 18

The world had transformed, overnight, into the deepest of the seven hells. Her temples were throbbing, her eardrums were throbbing, her entire fucking skull was throbbing; her arm ached so badly that she rather wanted to draw her sword and chop the thrice-damned thing off, and her mouth tasted like the inside of a chicken coop that hadn’t been cleaned in three years.

Somebody had wrapped her in an extra blanket during the night. It was rough, and scratchy, and smelled like Jaime: steel, leather, fire.

_Oh, gods._

She shot up into a sitting position; the blazing pain that burned through her almost making her pass out again; and for a moment her vision and her heartbeat were floundering in panic at the memory of knife-throwing, drinking and a great deal of clumsy and very drunken lust, before she was sighing rapidly and painfully in relief at the sight of him snoring away next to Tyrion on the opposite side of the fire; the two brothers sharing a blanket, and what appeared to be a bed made of wine bottles. Jaime’s arms were crossed tightly over his chest; his face was flushed and frowning; and he was murmuring something under his breath as though it were a form of penance:

‘The things I do for love.’  

Arya looked away and savagely wiped her eyes. She didn’t like watching him sleep. Somehow it felt like prying, and besides, her head hurt too much to worry about what Jaime Lannister had or hadn’t done for love. She kicked off her blankets and rose slowly to her feet; her knees buckling beneath her, then enduring.

It was hell. The world spun kaleidoscopically in one direction while her head spun in the other, bits and pieces of fragmented light, and trees, and the smell of the sea crowding in on her and making her gag, and as she covered her eyes and groaned, she thought about the number of times she had seen Tyrion in this condition and wondered,  _how the fuck can he do this every day?_

She wondered, gave up on wondering, and tottered out of the trees and down to the water; an expanse of shining turquoise that stretched all the way across the bay to King’s Landing, the burnt city rising black and red out of the water as towers of smoke billowed upwards into the sky; and she knew that today, as they travelled, the banks of Blackwater Bay would become cliffs, and the city would grow smaller and smaller; more distant…more forgettable.

Arya waded out into the shallows and dunked her head in the water. It rushed into her ears and made her eyes burn. She wrung out her hair and walked back to shore, droplets of water trickling slowly down her back, and when she removed her shoulder belt and tried to take her doublet off, the smouldering pain in her arm erupted into an inferno; the sleeve of her doublet welding stubbornly to her arm and threatening to take more skin with it.

She prised the doublet off one inch at a time. By the time she had finished, she was sobbing. The burn was large, and crimson – they’d used a greatsword to do it – and though the pain was the worst she had ever endured, she knew that this hadn’t been done to her to make her hurt.

She had plenty of scars, and most of them were gruesome. She didn’t really care what they looked like – if anything, she was rather fond of them. But this…this was a shoulder-to-elbow field-of-fire  _disfigurement_ , and though the pain of it would fade, the mark would always be there, reminding her in the same way that iron coins reminded everyone else:

_Don’t fuck with us._

Arya washed the burn in sea water and lavender oil, and bit on her lip till it bled, and as she fiercely blinked tears from her eyes, she looked out across the bay again at King’s Landing the Burned, and thought about the Mad King who had liked to burn people alive. And she could not even conceive of how somebody could enjoy doing  _this_  to people; spreading this kind of pain across their entire bodies; laughing and watching them scream as the skin melted off their bones…

_Am I the same as him?_

She shivered.

The sun had crept behind the clouds and let in the cold. She put her doublet back on again, wiped her eyes again, and walked slowly away from the sea, and when she arrived back at the place where they had camped, Tyrion was still asleep and Jaime was gone.

She found him deeper in the trees. His tracks were easy to follow. He was standing with his back to her, and staring at the ground, and when she approached him, he didn’t hear her coming. That pleased her.

His silver hair was a hilarious mess; standing on end in some places, standing too flat in others; and she noticed, for the thousandth time, the almost violently-commanding way that he took up space; his height and his beauty; his sword like a limb at his side to replace the one that he had lost, and suddenly, she was smiling, because she could see him starting to suspect that someone was behind him. She saw it in the way he tensed up; in every curve of his body as he fought with himself not to turn around, and the emerald fire of his gaze was boring into her even when he couldn’t see her; calling to her and making her ache with longing for the feeling of his hands touching her body and his lips on hers; for the recognition of her missing thing that she always saw in his gaze, and for the way that he had…filled the missingness up with…her heartbeat and…his.

Jaime was turning, and looking at her. She knew instantly that something was wrong.

‘I cannot go to Dragonstone,’ he said.

And her smile died without fighting.

She could see him waiting for her to ask why. She didn’t. She couldn’t. Inside, she was screaming at herself to control her face at the very least; to pull down her mask and have some self-respect. Her mask didn’t budge. Her weapons hung useless at her sides. And silence was the only weapon she had left against this…this… _what the fuck is happening to me?_

‘When Casterly Rock and Lannisport fell,’ Jaime told her; his voice business-like; matter-of-fact; cold;  ‘the Westerlands lost everything that could have had a hope of preparing them for another war: men, weapons, proper walls….a  _castle_ , for fuck’s sake…and if war is truly coming –’

‘War  _is_ coming,’ Arya growled; breaking the silence, not able to help herself.

‘– then I must do my duty by my people. I cannot defend them if I’m stuck on some jagged piece of rock in the middle of the sea.’

‘ _The rightful queen_ will be on that jagged piece of rock in the middle of the sea,’ Arya snapped, ‘and if you come to Dragonstone, and pledge loyalty to her cause, she’ll help you. She’ll protect them.’

Jaime threw back his head and laughed at her. The laughter hurt worse than her arm.

‘I very much doubt that the pretender queen of Westeros will rush to defend ‘the last outpost of Lannister rule,” Jaime jeered.

‘And Aegon  _will_?’ Arya exclaimed, wanting to wipe that smile off his face with the tip of her sword.

Jaime was still laughing at her.

‘ _Aegon_  can do whatever the fuck he wants, Lady Stark.’

‘You’re not declaring for  _either_ of them?’

‘I don’t particularly like either of them.’

‘ _Stay neutral,_ is  _that_ what you propose? Herd all your people into a box, wait until the war is over and accept whoever sits the Iron Throne by the end of it?  _Really?_ ’

‘That would imply that I give a fuck who sits the Iron Throne.’

‘Even if it turns out to be Aerys III?’

‘If Aerys III leaves the Westerlands alone, then I’m sure we’ll get along just fine.’

Arya’s fist connected with his face. Something cracked and bled beneath the impact. And as she turned away and stormed back to camp, she found herself fighting back a scream as her disbelief was torn out of her and replaced with unholy, boiling, white hot rage. It tore through her body like a firestorm; bursting viciously out through every pore of her skin and clawing her to the edge of a frenzy of hatred and wrath and agony at how fucking  _unconcerned_ he sounded, as though the choice between Aegon and Daenerys were no more important than painting a wall black or white.

 _After Lannisport…after the wedding…after_ me,  _he would still…he would…_

She clamped her hands over her ears and tried to make her mind shut up. It didn’t. Her thoughts screamed into her head, and howled and gloated and screeched with laughter; and reminded her, with a sadistic kind of triumph, that Jaime Lannister was not Ser Aemon the fucking Dragonknight, but the  _Kingslayer_ : oathbreaker, sister-fucker,  _child-murderer_ ; a son of  _Tywin  Lannister_, and her  _enemy_ , not  _good_  or  _noble_  or  _honourable_  or everything that was right with this  _fucking_ world, or any of the other  _stupid_ things that she had somehow made herself believe,  _you fool, you stupid, wounded, lonely, weak, pathetic little_ fool.

She couldn’t breathe, or see, or think; the pain in her body was horrendous, unbearable,  _atrocious_ , and she couldn’t  _take_  the fury on top of that, she couldn’t, it would suffocate her, it would kill her;  _he_ would kill her; last night she had handed him the power to do it on a silver fucking platter –

‘What’s going on?’ Tyrion was demanding, groggily raising his head to look at her, ‘you  _stepped on my head!_ ’

‘Lady Stark is throwing her toys out of the cot,’ Jaime sighed; emerging from the trees and looking at Arya at though she were entirely unreasonable (and quite possibly mad as well), and his eyes were glinting and his face was bleeding, and she was shoving him, and spitting at him with  _words_ pouring out of her mouth.

‘There might be blood in your veins, but you’re  _dead_ ,’ Arya spat, ‘you’re dead inside; you’re a fucking corpse; you’re crawling with maggots and shit and grey vomit; you’re a cunt; you’re a coward; you’re  _scared_ ; you’d let another monster burn this country to the ground sooner than bleed or hurt or do what’s right; you’ve shrivelled up and died; you’ve  _shrunk_ ; you’re  _dead_ ; the boy that stuck a sword in Aerys Targaryen’s back was fucking beautiful compared to you; he was  _beautiful_ ; where did he go;  _where the fuck did he go?_ ’

‘He grew up,’ Jaime shrugged, unmoved, and grunted in surprise when Arya punched him again, this time so hard that he fell to the floor.

Tyrion was bellowing at her to stop, and she was kicking Jaime in the ribs and winding him and drawing her sword; holding it to his throat; wanting to use it.

She tried to use it.

She couldn’t.

He wasn’t moving, or trying to fight her; just glaring to the heart of her and spitting blood out of his mouth; blood that she had put there. She prodded his throat with the tip of her sword, and took no small pleasure at the sight of him wincing.

She felt sick.

‘If you’re still here when I get back,’ Arya snarled, ‘I’ll put a sword through your fucking face.’

And she stormed into the trees without a backward glance.

‘Where are you going?’ Tyrion shouted after her.

‘To take a piss!’ she shouted back.

She moved deeper into the trees, and deeper into her rage; waiting for her anger to give her her Facelessness back; to make her a killer that would turn around, return to camp, and murder him without a trace of remorse or weakness. She waited. Nothing happened.

She could hear Tyrion and Jaime arguing; loudly, pointlessly.

Nothing happened.

Jaime was mounting up and riding away.

Nothing happened.

As the sound of hooves faded away, she tried to change her face.

Nothing happened.

It was only then that she sat down and cried.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Tyrion had had nightmares all night; most of them about Dany. He had seen her bleed to death and dissolve into pools of blood; her silver hair red with it; his own guilt black with it; guilt at what he had become; guilt at what he had said.

Two days ago, he had treated her like a fucking whore.

 _‘You agreed to this,’_ he had shouted, ‘ _it’s a little late to start complaining about it now.’_

Today, she might be dead.

(Yes, Arya had repeatedly assured him that Dany would recover quickly, but he had seen a serious thigh wound before. The soldier in question had bled to death two minutes after the blade was removed).

_The marriage to Aegon was my idea_, Tyrion thought, _she might have agreed to it, but…I was the one who thought of it. I imagined myself to be putting the realm first, before me, before her, before what either of us wanted; to be proving to her…proving _what _to her? All I proved was that I cared more for a fucking iron chair than I did for her dignity; that I am my father’s fucking son; that I treat the people I love like_ property _._

With such things weighing on his mind, a headache was almost comforting. He had been hung over for so many years that the sensation was almost a friend; patting him on the back and telling him that everything would be alright.

Tyrion could tell, however, that alcohol and Arya were not destined to become similarly acquainted. She rode beside him in silence with her headache positively radiating out of her; her colouring ghastly, her eyes blood red and screwed up tightly against the sun, and her mood leaving much to be desired. And he looked and looked for the serene, quietly humorous, infuriatingly-ghostlike Arya that he had known in Braavos, and he could not find her. She was gone; vanished. And something told him she was never coming back.

Coming to that conclusion frightened him badly.  _You cannot un-train a Faceless Man._  But he knew people, and he knew what they looked like, and today, the Arya riding next to him was looking less and less like a soulless killer and more and more like a person who’d just had her heart kicked in the arse.

Tyrion felt compassion welling up inside him; compassion, and disbelief too, because a part of him could  _still_  not believe it, not even after what he had seen over the past two days. Jaime? Why  _Jaime_? How the fuck had  _that_  happened? He could easily see why any man (or woman) with all their parts intact could look at Arya, and want her. He could not say the same for his brother – not anymore. Jaime’s days of causing mass fainting fits wherever he went were long gone.

And yet when Tyrion saw them together, it made a strange sort of sense. They seemed to…  _sustain_  each other in a way that was so subtle as to be almost imperceptible, and yet so unambiguously intimate that the mere act of looking at them sometimes seemed like an intrusion.  _How the fuck had it happened?_

Whatever the answer, there was no doubt in Tyrion’s mind that it was all Jaime’s fault. But he didn’t care about Jaime. He cared about her. And if he cared about her, then he should pry. It was what he was best at.

‘There’s no wedding without a bedding,’ Tyrion said matter-of-factly.

‘What?’ Arya murmured; not listening.

‘My dear brother and your sweet sister,’ he prattled, ‘the marriage isn’t legal unless there’s a bedding. So unless they somehow managed to fuck each other during the feast without anybody noticing, then  _they_  are not married, in the sight of gods  _or_ men.’

‘I don’t give a fuck,’ Arya told him, sounding miserable and exhausted.

‘ _I_ give a fuck,’ Tyrion persisted, in a loud voice that made her wince, ‘I was married to Sansa once, when she was still sweet and innocent, and while at the time I could not bring myself to fuck a dejected, petrified thirteen-year-old girl who had just lost her entire family, I still maintain sufficient affection for her to feel awkward about her marrying my elder brother.’

Arya stared in amazement, and Tyrion grinned wickedly.

‘Doesn’t mean I’d want to fuck her  _now_ , though. After what happening at her wedding, I’m starting to doubt she has a cunt at all.’

‘She needs to have a cock to be dangerous?’

‘My sister always believed the opposite. My sister is dead. Draw your inferences from there.’

Arya snorted, and smiled at him.

‘You’re a real cunt, you know that?’

‘Thank you, Lady Stark.’

‘You think women can’t be dangerous unless they have cocks?’

‘I don’t assign any importance to genitalia when it comes to being dangerous.’

‘You just  _did_.’

‘Yes. Ten seconds ago. You can’t hold me to account for an opinion I had ten seconds ago. I might very well have changed my mind since then.’

‘ _I’m_ dangerous, and  _I_ don’t have a cock.’

‘Yes, but you don’t have an identity either.’

The smile departed from Arya’s face like a small child fleeing a nightmare, and she gave him a testy sideways glance that clearly announced ‘I know what you’re about, Lannister. Stop it.’

Tyrion cleared his throat and hastily turned the conversation to other matters.

‘How sure are you that the Faceless Men told you the truth?’ he asked her.

‘About?’ Arya drawled impatiently.

‘Sansa making Daenerys’ death look like an accident in exchange for Northern freedom and the Stark name for little Lord Eddard?’

‘They made it clear there was no proof, but…myself, I am inclined to believe them.’

‘Then I am sorrier than I can say.’

Arya smiled at him again.

‘I went to see her on the morning of the wedding, you know,’ she said, ‘ I…I keep trying to think; to remember…if there were any signs…if I could have seen what was coming…’

She had a look in her eyes of one who had seen all the horrors in the world, but had only half-learned the meaning of numbness. The past seemed to roar into her present and play itself out in front of her as though it were happening again; as though Tyrion were some small part of her mind that hadn’t seen what had happened and needed to be told again.

‘It was awkward at first,’ Arya continued, ‘but then she was…kind…and funny…and once or twice that morning, she was even my sister. Then I thought about the things that she’s done…I’m thinking about them now…and I can’t bring myself to think badly of her. Am I wicked?’

‘You never have been,’ Tyrion murmured.

He had obviously said it with more affection than he had attended, because Arya was staring at him now with tears in her eyes; and he could not handle crying now; not now, not ever, he was not made for it.

‘Look at me, for instance,’ Tyrion hurriedly and flamboyantly declared, ‘I’ve murdered both my parents –’

Her face fell.

‘Tyrion –’

‘– raped my own wife, prostituted the woman I love –’

‘Tyrion, shut up.’

‘– and allowed Casterly Rock and Lannisport to burn to the ground because I was too much of a coward to protect either of them. So you see there is really no contest as to which of us is the wickedest. I said the same thing to Jaime.’

Arya was looking at him with that touching impatience that she usually demonstrated when he told the truth about himself.

‘You told Jaime that you were wickeder than him?’ she mocked.

‘No,’ Tyrion scowled, ‘I said that  _he_ was wickeder than  _me_.’

‘I thought as much,’ Arya sighed.

‘You disagree, do you?’

‘Did I say that?’

‘No, but you meant it.’

Arya groaned aloud and rolled her eyes at him.

‘I simply think,’ she said calmly, ‘that the two of you need to stop brooding and just  _have a conversation_. Even if it ends in a fight.’

‘Who said anything about brooding?’ Tyrion demanded, ‘we had an excellent screaming match while you were gone.’

‘I’m delighted to hear it!’ Arya declared.

‘Do you love him?’ Tyrion asked abruptly.

‘No,’ Arya snapped, ‘I hate him.’

 _Oh, gods,_  Tyrion thought,  _she adores him._

‘My dear Lady Stark,’ he declared, ‘if there’s one thing in this world that I know about, it’s women.’

‘Agreed,’ Arya concurred, sounding suspicious.

‘And such a stringent and immediate ‘no,’ on top of a declaration of hatred, often means the exact opposite when it comes to women like you.’

‘You think there are women like me?’

He tried to answer, and couldn’t, which naturally pleased her greatly.

‘Why do you care, anyway?’ Arya asked, ‘I thought you hated him.’

‘I do,’ Tyrion agreed, ‘but I’m not  _entirely_  indifferent to you. So naturally, I worry, I meddle and I plot.’

‘You don’t need to worry, or meddle, or plot,’ Arya said, ‘I’m a Faceless Man. Forgetting how to love is the first thing they teach you.’

‘But they  _don’t_  let you forget how to hate, apparently?’ Tyrion drawled.

‘Nobody’s perfect,’ Arya shrugged, and spurred her horse ahead of his.


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that the rating has changed to M.

 

Sansa had scarcely read the raven scroll informing her of the Karstarks’ betrayal before the black cloaks had broken her door down and seized her; roaring that the king wished to see her and dragging her from her chambers so quickly that her feet had hardly seemed to touch the ground. She had screamed, of course, and she had protested. But then she had seen the bodies of her own guards lying outside her door with their throats cut, and her struggles had ceased while her heart had thundered madly in her chest, and the empty space at her waist where she usually kept her dagger had howled like an abyss.

_I will die today._

The knowledge hit her like a hammer to the chest, and covered her body in a thin sheen of sweat that seemed to awaken the red vaults of the corridors above her and place her face-to-face with blood newly-spilled; her blood. And she thought of the events of the past few days, and of Aegon’s violet eyes that had grown darker and darker, and madder and madder, and the hammer hit her again, hard.

_I will die today._

But she flung the premonition away from her, along with everything else that she could not see, or touch. If her fate was fixed, it was fixed; and screaming and crying about it would achieve nothing.

Not that she wouldn’t try her utmost to live, of course. Aegon was transparent, weak and vulnerable, and she would weep, wheedle, flatter, and if necessary, fuck, to assure her continued existence.

The thought almost made Sansa laugh aloud.

_Fuck, little bird. Fuck for your life._

She hardly thought a little _more_ would make much difference to her; not after four solid days of opening her legs, closing her eyes and pretending to enjoy herself while Aegon moaned and grunted above her screaming her sister’s name. It happened so often now that it wasn’t even funny anymore.

Of course fucking hadn’t been the only thing that she had done since the wedding; try as Aegon might to keep her on her back day and night. She had also done plenty of seething; unable to _believe_ that her knifeman, _whom she had once seen impale a spider at twenty feet_ , had hit Daenerys in the thigh instead of the throat, that her Northmen hadn’t carried out her orders and killed every fucking Frey that had been invited to the wedding, that the ineffectual, bloodthirsty cretins _hadn’t even managed to kill Ser Jaime_ ; the smallest, least important part of the scheme, but one that she cherished nonetheless. She had also spent rather a lot of time praying; night and day, wherever she went, whatever she did: praying to the old gods and the new that Daenerys would die of her injury; that _that_ at least would be done despite her wretched sister’s interference; that Daenerys would die, and the North would be free.

She had only been praying for two days when the ravens had arrived.

The raven scrolls had made several declarations, each more disastrous than the next. They had declared that Aegon was neither a true king nor a true Targaryen, but the son of an overly-ambitious Pentoshi magister and a lady descending directly from the last Blackfyre pretenders. They had declared that the wedding massacre had been orchestrated in order to end the life of the true queen and to rob her of the Northern half of her kingdom. And finally, they had called upon all true men to come to Queen Daenerys at Dragonstone, to declare their loyalty and to pledge troops in the war that was to come.

Aegon had promptly lost his mind, and had wasted a great deal of time and soap beheading every person that failed to posit a reasonable hypothesis as to how Daenerys could possibly have gotten to Dragonstone so quickly, before a declaration of war had arrived from Daenerys herself; declaring herself to be in excellent health, in possession of both Rhaegal and Viserion, and demanding that Aegon give up the throne before she returned to burn the rest of King’s Landing to the ground.

The declaration’s tedious (if typical) Targaryen raving about fire and blood, as well as its incendiary use of the words ‘Blackfyre pretenders’ in relation to the king, had caused mass panic and mass chatter, but so few defections that Daenerys’ threats had scarcely seemed worthy of the paper they were written on. Until these idiotic, traitorous, _mindless_ Karstarks had gotten it into their heads to entertain delusions of independence.

_Everything will fall to pieces after this; no matter what I say. A Northern House declaring for Daenerys will make people think again, and thinking is the last thing that Aegon (or I) wish to encourage._

As the guards knocked on Aegon’s chamber door, Arya came to Sansa’s mind: awkward, stammering and graceless, as she had appeared on the morning of the wedding. Sansa knew now that at least a part of that awkwardness had been guilt – recognisable only now, only after the fact – and she wondered, briefly, if Arya had really fucked Ser Jaime, as Aegon constantly loved to claim, or if it had been something more innocent than that. And as she was dragged into the chamber, and thrown to her knees before Aegon, Sansa looked up at her king and saw his eyes; saw the spiteful twist in his lip and the face marked by a thousand imagined wrongs, and somehow, she knew it was the latter.

 _Run, little sister_ , she thought, _wherever you are, run for your life and do not_ ever _come back._

‘ _Why?_ ’ Aegon was demanding with a maddening air of offended righteousness, ‘why would you betray me in this way? Have I not given you everything you wanted; have I not _fucked_ you well enough; WHY?’

‘I knew nothing – ’

Sansa screamed in shock and pain as he struck her brutally across the face. Blood began to pour from her torn lip and to dribble down her chin; she turned her head back towards her king and glared defiantly and fearlessly up at him; and in that moment it was not Aegon Targaryen glaring down at her with vicious violet eyes, but Joffrey: the mad child who had become king.

 _No one will do that to me again,_ Sansa thought, _NO ONE_ , and as Aegon turned away from her to remove something from the table, she felt wolf blood grip her and her nails digging into her palms; ‘ _calm yourself, sweetling_ ,’ Petyr used to whisper, sweet Petyr; his lips brushing her ear as her chest heaved in anger, ‘ _or I shall have to punish you._ ’

But her anger was pulsing through her veins and paralysing her, and Petyr’s words were dissolving; fading into the fury. And when Aegon turned around once more and approached her; dangling a jar of wildfire before her eyes, her heart stopped in her chest, and her anger was cut off, suddenly and brutally, from its own lifeblood.

‘Do you know what this is, Lady Sansa?’ Aegon purred.

The very sight of it called up visions of a Southern sky turned green, purple and red by a bridge of burning ships; of the smell of wine and fear as her fingers touched the Hound’s face and _the Hound’s_ fingers closed around her throat; his grip lessening slightly as he bent slowly over to kiss her.

 _I should have gone with him_ , she told herself, herself as she had been then, _so much might have been different had I gone with him –_

‘Drink it,’ Aegon commanded, his tongue seeming to lap the words up like wine; his tone forceful, breathless…aroused.

_I will die today._

Sansa vainly tried to push the fear and the revulsion away from her.

 _Just think._ Think. _THINK_.

‘The Karstarks will be punished, my king,’ Sansa gravely declared, looking deep into Aegon’s eyes and willing the truth to shine through hers, _stop trembling, stop it,_ stop, ‘on my honour as a Stark, they will be punished –’

‘ _Drink. It_ ,’ Aegon spat; his face red with anticipation, his silver hair dishevelled and the eyes that she had gazed into a thousand times bright with excitement, anger, madness –

_Reason with him._

‘Why would I dare remain at court if I had betrayed my own king?’ Sansa scoffed.

‘DRINK IT!’ Aegon screeched; pressing the jar against her cheek as an involuntary scream of terror escaped her, and made the shame in Sansa’s chest burn almost as badly as the fear.

Tears began to stream softly down her face and to choke up from the depths of her throat. Some of them were even real as she felt the liquid dance within the jar; the threat licking grotesquely at her face like the tongue of a cat.

Aegon was laughing at her, and spitting.

‘Tears will not save you, traitorous whore, now DRINK!’

The tears were hot on her cheeks and the jar was terrifyingly cool, and she was weeping and pleading like a maiden in a song while clutching Aegon’s knees like the basest of bed slaves.

‘I do not weep to save myself, sweet king,’ Sansa whimpered, ‘I weep for the dishonour caused to your name. I weep that the Karstarks have betrayed our cause and called your wife the true queen. My son Eddard is their liege lord. Give me leave to bring them to justice in his name. Give me leave to execute such a vengeance that Castamere will be forgotten in the wake of it. And when my work is done – _then_ let me consign myself to fire; with the knowledge that I have done my duty.’

She could only see Aegon’s knees now; the rest of her vision obscured by her tears, by her petrifying fear, and by the menacing weight of death against her face; and she thought of Eddard, far away at the Eyrie, and clung to the memory of him like hope; her fierce little warrior who was not Harrold’s at all, but Petyr’s…and hers.

 _I will debase myself in far worse ways than this if it means that Eddard will live_ , she thought desperately; clasping Aegon’s knees and remembering her boy’s face, his laugh, his frown, _if I die, he dies too_ , _I will not die today…_

And Aegon’s hand was touching her shoulder, softly, gently, and her heart was leaping with hope as he raised her to her feet and kissed her…and sinking again, and racing and limping with fear, with utter desolation at the savagery with which Aegon’s lips met hers; as though he meant to hurt her with his mouth rather than give her pleasure with it.

Sansa closed her eyes tightly, buried her hands in Aegon’s hair and let him do it, _think of Eddard, think of your son, tears aren’t a woman’s only weapon_ , _I will not die today,_ and as his teeth gnashed painfully at her cut lip, his tongue greedily lapping up her blood as though it were Dornish red, she tried desperately to fight the pain and the bile rising in her throat; to think of her son and nothing else, _if I die, he dies too, I will not die today, I cannot die today;_ but Aegon’s mouth was moving from her lips to her neck and biting her there; his teeth grazing her skin, _think of your son, if I die, he dies too, I will not die today_ … and then blood was erupting from the flesh of her neck, and she was screaming.

Aegon’s arms were locking hard around her waist as her blood flowed into his mouth; he was biting deeper and deeper; and she was screaming and lashing out with all her strength as searing, horrific, unnatural pain burned through her _think of your son, if I die, he dies too, I will not die today_ , _I cannot die today, I will be_ damned _if I let this son-of-a-whore kill my boy_ but her struggles were making no difference at all, and neither were her screams; she could feel him swallowing, _swallowing_ , _gods save us, what I have done,_ and Aegon was shrieking with laughter and delight as her blood burst out of her in a jet of crimson agony; drenching both of them in its radiance and wrapping her up in fear and death.

_If I die, Eddard dies too, I will die today, I will die, Eddard, EDDARD_

Aegon’s teeth tore out of her neck. Her blood was red on his lips as he smiled at her. She had no screams left and no voice; her words croaking out of her; her knees failing, as she felt herself beginning to bleed out.

Aegon was standing over her; still smiling his red smile. Blood was staining his silver hair and running down his face like raindrops. He raised the jar of wildfire slowly above her head and upended it.

‘Eddard,’ Sansa murmured, ‘Eddard.’

A grotesque smile was the last thing she saw: a smile, and the flames.


	20. Chapter 20

'I want wine.'

'You shouldn't have drunk it all on the first night, then.'

'You drank it too!'

'Not half as much as you did.'

'I maintain that we're being too careful.'

'Since Varys' little birds haven't found us yet, I will take that as a good thing.'

'This is worse than the black cells!'

'Shut up.'

'We could have stopped for wine at Rosby –'

'We would've been seen.'

'We could have stopped at Stokeworth –'

' _We would have been seen_!'

'Some things are worth capture and imprisonment; wine being among them!'

'For fuck's sake, Tyrion,  _will you shut up about wine?_ '

'I know you're angry at my brother, little lady, but don't you talk to me like that!'

'I'm not little, I'm not a lady and I don't care about your stupid brother!'

'Really? You must be the first woman in the history of the world not to care about my stupid brother!'

Tyrion was spared being subjected to more of Arya's utterly-unjust and ill-placed ire by a chilling and hauntingly-familiar screech that seemed to tear down to the very foundations of the trees and make both their voices die in their throats. The air around them filled suddenly with smoke and the smell of burning trees, and as Tyrion looked slowly at Arya, and she at him, he knew from the look on her face that he wasn't imagining things; that the sound they heard was a voice, and a voice that they both recognised.

Drogon.

Arya, apparently unconcerned by the smoking and the screeching, put a finger to her lips, dismounted and moved quietly off; making no more noise than a non-existent gust of wind. The smoke swallowed her up and grew thicker and thicker as Tyrion half-dismounted, half-fell and scrambled after her; tendrils of smoke fastening around his throat and making him choke, and soon enough the natural light between the trees was dying, to be replaced by the light of fire.

Drogon sat, monstrous and magnificent, in what Tyrion imagined had once been a clearing, but what was now a shallow, nest-like crater in the forest floor. The bones of both animals and men littered the bottom of this charming arrangement and stared eyelessly up at Drogon as he spat great, volcanic rivers of flame into the trees directly opposite Tyrion and Arya; turning the blackened corpses of trees to ash and the living bodies of trees to blackened corpses as veritable mountains of smoke and ash churned upwards into the sky.

'He looks happy,' Arya drily observed.

'I recommend that we leave,' Tyrion said sharply, 'now.'

To his amazement, Arya glared at him.

'If they can see the smoke from the city, and I'm sure that they can,' she said, 'then it won't take Aegon long to put two and two together –'

' _Let him_ put two and two together if it helps his arithmetic,' Tyrion drawled, ' _we_ should go.'

'What if he sends men out to capture –'

'A bunch of inept lickspittles are sent out to capture a dragon and you're worried the  _dragon_ might get hurt?' Tyrion mocked in disbelief.

'Not entirely,' Arya shrugged, 'I'm also concerned that the lickspittles will pick up our trail.'

'We'll be long gone by the time any black cloaks get here,' he told her.

'I'm going to chase Drogon away,' Arya declared.

'You're going to do  _what?_ ' Tyrion repeated, aghast.

'So that he's  _also_ long gone by the time any black cloaks get here!' Arya drawled.

'I do believe you've lost your mind, Lady Stark,' Tyrion pronounced harshly, a hint of desperation in his voice, 'if you absolutely have to do something stupid, then why not try to  _lead_ him away?'

'With what? He's already killed everything interesting enough to make him want to move!'

'Arya. This is reckless and stupid.'

'Is that meant to deter me?'

_It would have. Once._

But she was looking down at him with a new and irrational courage in her eyes; a recklessness that he had never seen in her, and that he had seen far too many times in Jaime; a thrill at the prospect of looking the Stranger in the face and spitting in it that made almost all hope of reasoning with her sink sadly and desperately down to Tyrion's boots; and he bitterly regretted not being tall enough or strong enough to simply crack her on the head and drag her away.

Arya once again began to speak.

'If Aegon gets his hands on just  _one_ dragon –'

'Any person he sends to help him 'get his hands on one dragon' is going to find himself burnt to a crisp,' Tyrion replied.

'Drogon  _knows_ me,' Arya insisted.

'You aren't bonded with him, and he hasn't seen you in  _five days_ ,' Tyrion half-reasoned, half-begged, 'he's probably forgotten you exist by now.'

That seemed to make her stop and think, and he watched her thoughts turning inwards, and reason winning over insanity.

_Got her._

'I'm going to chase him away,' she said.

'Arya,  _don't!_ ' Tyrion hissed.

And she walked to the edge of the crater, and shouted.

' _DROGON_!'

Drogon turned slowly, his black scales rippling in the firelight, and regarded Arya with what Tyrion could only call amazement at her nerve as she walked slowly and carefully down the side of the crater and spoke to him; the liquid gold of High Valyrian sounding harsh and threatening on her tongue.

_Is she threatening him? Seven hells, is she_ threatening  _him?_

Drogon's eyes widened, red and black and red as Arya reached the bottom of the crater and faced him down; her legs planted firmly apart; her muscles stretching taunt with all the murderous grace of a wolf going in for the kill. And her voice was growing louder and crueller as Drogon snarled, then roared at her; his breath picking at her clothing and her hair; and though Tyrion couldn't see her eyes, he knew that they looked like wildfire. Drogon was raising himself up to his full height and screeching down at her; the spikes on his head bristling and impaling the air around him, and Tyrion wanted to open his mouth and shout at her to run for her fucking life, but there was no breath left in his lungs, no life left in his limbs. His knees had turned to jelly.

Then a torrent of flame burst forth from Drogon's mouth; Arya darted gracefully out of the way; and Tyrion was screaming at her; cursing the day that he had ever met this… _insane_ child as she drew her dagger and dove back  _towards_  Drogon instead of running away from him. The dragon sent hurricanes of flame tearing after her as she sprinted a circle around him; trapping her in a labyrinth with walls of fire, but she danced through every gap in the flames as though she were made of air; the blade of her dagger in her hand now, poised for the right time to throw it.

_ She means to injure him rather than allow the slightest chance of his being caught _ , Tyrion thought, _  Daenerys will knight her for this – or kill her. _

Arya leapt between Drogon's legs and emerged behind him in an elegant crouch as he spat out another conflagration of fiery Targaryen revenge, and a shroud was thrown over every one of Tyrion's senses except his sight as a multitude of dangers and events and horrors crammed themselves into the space of a single second.

Arya flung the dagger at Drogon. As she threw, he looked back at her over his wing; his jaws open wide, an inferno between them, the flames roaring out of his mouth to engulf her whole. Then somehow, inexplicably, Jaime was there; emerging like a wraith from thin air and barrelling into her; his lower arm catching fire as he knocked her out of the way of the flames and sent both of them sprawling into the dirt.

The dagger found its mark; burying itself up to the hilt in Drogon's lower neck. The dragon screamed in pain and hurled himself into the air faster than a quarrel launched from a crossbow; and the beat of wings threatened to knock Tyrion over as he raced down towards Arya and Jaime; the dragon's shadow blotting out the sun, then letting it in again as Drogon rose up to the heavens and soared away.

Jaime lay unconscious and still as a corpse as Arya threw great handfuls of ashen soil onto his burning arm with one hand and checked his pulse with the other. The colour in her face was dying along with the flames, and by the time that Tyrion had thrown himself down beside them, she was screaming.

'Tyrion, there's no pulse, there's no pulse, THERE'S NO PULSE!'

'Don't be an idiot; of course there's a pulse,' Tyrion snapped; digging his fingers into Jaime's neck and ignoring the hysteria that Arya's words made well up inside him  _people do not keel over and die because their arms have been set on fire; the very notion is _impossible.

The impossibility of it was not sufficient to prevent Tyrion from sobbing aloud when Jaime's eyes opened; opened, then screwed up again as the pain hit him; a scream lingering longingly on his lips and failing to escape them as his entire body began to convulse in pain; his face contorted in agony; his left hand,  _the only one that he had left,_ red, swollen, burnt by dragonfire,  _oh gods, his_ hand _, his fucking hand, no, no, please, NO._

Jaime was muttering to himself and desperately attempting to grasp at his left hand with the golden fingers of his right. Horror was gripping at Tyrion in a similar way and making bile rise in his throat; and Arya, crying and trying very hard not to, was attempting to open one of the compartments of her shoulder belt with fingers that trembled so badly that they were worse than useless; every stifled groan that escaped Jaime's lips only making the trembling worse.

'What is it, what are you looking for?' Tyrion demanded.

'The fucking lavender oil,' Arya sobbed; pulling manically at the straps and achieving nothing; yelping as Tyrion leaned forward and roughly pulled the belt over her head.

'Calm him down while I look for the bloody lavender oil,' Tyrion commanded in his best Hand of the King voice as he began to rifle through the compartments of the belt; his own level-headedness surprising him as he tried to block out the sound of Jaime moaning 'no, please  _gods_ , no', and the brutal, violent pain that burst almost visibly from his brother's thrashing body when Arya took hold of Jaime's shoulders and forced him onto his back.

Jaime was clutching at her sleeve, burnt hand and all; and looking at her with a face the colour of chalk and eyes the colour of pitch:

'No fucking maesters and no fucking knives,  _you do not let them touch my fucking hand; you do not let them take it_ ; if anyone tries to take it, you have to  _kill_ them, do you understand; I don't care how bad it is, it'll heal, I  _know_  it'll heal, tell them I'll shove my sword up their fucking arses  _if they come anywhere near me,_  Arya, please, promise me,  _promise me_ –'

'Nobody is going to touch your hand or try to hurt you; you just need to lie still so we can make you better,' Arya replied; tears streaming down her face and her arms shaking from the force of Jaime's convulsions as she held onto his shoulders, told him to lie still, told him that nobody would lay a knife on his hand while she drew breath, and Jaime's eyes were fixing upon Arya, and slowly closing, and opening again; the fear a little less each time he blinked.

Tyrion, still raking through Arya's shoulder belt for the lavender oil, soon found himself losing patience with both of them; Jaime gazing at Arya through each new inferno of pain and fear as though she were the most beautiful fucking thing in the universe; Arya, still crying like a five-year-old, behaving with the most flabbergasting and mildly-disgusting tenderness that Tyrion had ever seen; stroking Jaime's hair, kissing his forehead, and whispering, again and again, that it wasn't a bad burn, that he only needed to breathe, that they only needed to make him better. And Tyrion stared at Jaime's hand, noted the absence of blackened flesh, and found himself praying and hoping:  _please. Please. Please._

Jaime's eyes were green, and shining with pain by the time that he was calm enough for Arya to apply the last of her lavender oil to the burn. Tyrion looked at the flesh and away from it more times than he could count as Jaime swore and screamed and ground his teeth,  _maybe it's not so bad, it doesn't look too bad, maybe he'll be alright_ , and by the time the bottle was finished, Arya had progressed from childish crying to all-out bawling, and was looking down at Jaime as though he had run her through rather than saved her life.

'Why did you do it?' she sobbed, 'you  _stupid_ , why did you do it?'

Jaime, his eyes delirious with pain, somehow managed to look up at her like she was mad, and to say, in a flatly-exasperated voice:

'I haven't rescued anyone in years, Lady Stark. I must keep in practice.'

 

 

* * *

 

 

Arya sat fuming beside the fire; Tyrion's snoring prickling her temper, and the sight of Jaime's fitful dozing making it smoulder dangerously.

The burn on Jaime's hand was not serious. The dragonfire had only touched it for a moment. It was red, and swollen, and angry-looking, and probably hurt like all seven hells put together, but it wouldn't take long to heal. She saw that now…now that she wasn't panicking and bursting into tears like a stupid little idiot.

' _There's no pulse?' REALLY?_

It hadn't been difficult to go from tolerating Jaime to hating him. The manner of his departure had certainly given her reason enough. What  _had_  been difficult was the way she would slip down into dreams of him with  _relief_  rather than hatred, because of the knowledge of what she would find there.

Every night, she would dream of returning from her master's house to the dragon chamber beneath the Red Keep, and every night, the terror and the madness would grip her, just as mercilessly as they had gripped her then. She would pace, and shout, and laugh about nothing, and hate doing it; and yet she would cling to it because of what the alternative was; the alternative consequence of recognising that she'd been held down by her own people and had a red hot broadsword pressed into her flesh.

She would experience that horror all over again. The fear would turn her mind inside out…and then Jaime would be there: speaking, shrugging, stretching his hand out to her, and then suddenly, holding her; enclosing her in a cocoon of relief, and warmth, and home. And she would remember  _everything_  about what that had felt like: the temperature of the skin of his neck; the smell of dust, smoke and blood on his doublet; the way he had rocked her slowly without ridiculing her for crying; the way his fingers had stroked her hair and his lips had kissed her forehead, and the words that he had whispered: 'it's alright, my love. You're not there, with them. You're here with me.'

She would be safe and warm in his arms all night. Then she'd wake up in the morning and remember that he'd left like a fucking jackass; as though flesh and blood mirrors of grief and understanding had never even existed between them, and she would tell herself that for all her posturing, she was just as bad as the rest of them, 'them' being the thousands of women who tolerated being treated like the contents of the average sewer in exchange for the odd kindness every now and then.

And  _now_ , as if his initial behaviour hadn't been bad enough, the bastard had not only  _come back_ , but had almost gotten himself killed saving her life, which naturally made  _her_ feel guilty and dream up vision after horrible vision of what might have happened to him had he jumped in one second later than he had.

 _I shouldn't_ care  _what happens to him_ , Arya thought stubbornly; her temper flaring as Jaime began to mutter in his sleep 'the things I do for love,' the same thing that he had muttered on the morning of his departure; and Arya promptly leapt to her feet, walked over to Jaime, crouched down beside him, and poked him in the ribs, hard.

His eyes opened languidly; pain swimming deep within them like wildfire beneath the waves of Blackwater Bay, and she hated herself for the sweet, sensual throb of blood that paralysed her entire body as his eyes met hers.

Jaime cupped her cheek. The touch of his skin burned her. She slapped his hand away. He winced. Then his face settled into a comfortingly-familiar expression of exasperated conceit, and she knew that he would not try that again.

"The things I do for love,' Arya snapped, 'what does it mean?'

The colour drained rapidly from Jaime's face.

'How do you –'

'You talk in your sleep,' Arya impatiently interrupted, 'what does it mean?'

Jaime hesitated.

'It's…what I said to Cersei just before I crippled your brother,' he said.

The remark was made with complete honesty, and with absolutely no hint of expecting forgiveness. It disgusted her.

_But he isn't the same –_

It  _disgusted_  her.

He was watching her intently; his eyes fixed helplessly on every movement of her face, and as Arya pictured Jaime in her mind: younger, crueller, shrugging in resignation, and shoving Bran from the window without a second thought, his leaving suddenly made sense. She knew him far too well to doubt it.

'Is Bran why you  _left_?' Arya hissed.

Jaime's eyes shifted from her face to her throat; his eyelashes long, and blonde.

'I left because it suddenly occurred to me that carrying on with the man who crippled your brother might bring you into dishonour,' he shrugged.

'You and I are  _not_ 'carrying on',' Arya imperiously corrected, 'we've fooled around on two occasions; once when we were drunk; another time when I might as well have been.'

'Oh, is  _that_ what we were doing?' Jaime mocked, 'fooling around? Of course! What was I thinking? Do you and Loras Tyrell have a bet on how long you can betray your white cloak before Barristan the Bold finds out? Or are you simply taking pity on the poor, scarred cripple while he can still get it up?'

'Don't twist things,' Arya snapped.

'No, no, I'm  _delighted_  to know the truth,' Jaime spat, 'you make me feel quite a fool for concerning myself with something like your  _honour_.'

'Do you  _really_  expect me to believe that you left because you feared your presence would bring me  _dishonour_?' Arya retorted, 'are you fucking  _joking_?'

She waited for a smirk and a laugh to tell her that he was.

Instead, he looked at her like she'd just spat in his face.

Arya stared at him in amazement as the naked, unarmoured hurt of Jaime's expression scrambled to arrange itself into a sardonic smile, and she felt her heart melting into a stupid, weak, pathetic little puddle on the ground between them.

Jaime kept trying to smile. All he succeeded in doing was making himself look guilty. She had no idea what her own face looked like, but whatever her expression, it made him speak to her as honestly as though he had never left at all.

'Do you want to know what the worst part is?' Jaime murmured, 'I hadn't even thought of what I did to Bran before the morning I left you, that is, you and my idiot brother. I  _should_  have thought of it, don't you think? Any normal person would think of it.  _Any normal person_ with the slightest sense of dignity would consider it sufficient reason to avoid you completely. Even after our talk at that ridiculous welcoming feast, when I  _knew_ that avoiding you was going to be impossible…what I did to your brother should have been incentive enough to  _stay the fuck away from you_ ; to refuse to put you in a position where there would be  _the slightest chance of_ …of course it's eminently possibly that I did not wish to think of it. Perhaps some part of me hoped that I would wake up one morning and find that I had never done it at all. Perhaps I was too drunk on you to think straight. But whatever it was…I did not think of Bran.'

Arya stared mutely, mesmerised in spite of herself.

'I dreamed of him the night before I left,' Jaime continued, 'all fucking night. Again and again. I pushed him from that tower a thousand bloody times. And when I woke up, and realised what I had forgotten; what I had done to your blood, and what it meant, I… I had… _imagined_ …after Casterly Rock, after Brienne, after  _this_ ,' he slowly raised his stump, 'that I had… _changed_ somewhat…that I had purged myself of that innate fucking Lannister instinct for thinking of myself and no one else…and then to realise that even now, after  _everything_ ; I haven't changed one fucking bit…it seemed as though every second I'd ever spent with you had been…a deceit; a kind of theft; an act of selfishness…with no regard for your honour, or…or your  _peace_. It was incredible what went through me, I…I couldn't…after that, do you wonder that I wanted to leave? That I had to put as many leagues as possible between us before we ended up doing something that couldn't be undone?'

'Fucking, do you mean?' Arya demanded.

' _Arya_ ,' Jaime sighed.

'Why didn't you just  _tell_  me that?' she asked, bewildered and annoyed, 'why did you have to act like such a cunt? And  _please_ don't say it was in order to make me hate you.'

The guilty look on Jaime's face was all the confirmation she needed.

'Arya –' he started.

'You fucking  _shit_ ,' she growled.

'I'm sorry,' Jaime mumbled.

'You're  _sorry_?' Arya exclaimed, 'I lost my  Facelessness because of your sweet little stunt, Jaime; I was scared to death!'

In her own ears, the complaint sounded rather feeble, and she rushed to compensate for it with a look of fury that didn't seem to fool Jaime for a second.

'Yes, I can see you're  _crushed_ ,' he remarked infuriatingly.

' _Can_  you?' she spat in reply.

'I noticed it the moment I saw you again.'

'How nice for you. You don't  _ever_ get to decide what's good or bad for me. I'm not a child.'

'I left to protect you; not out of a desire to dictate your life to you.'

Arya threw her hands up in exasperation.

'So instead of just  _asking_ me what I felt about Bran; you automatically assume that I have this sinister boiling ball of hatred deep inside me that I'm sitting on and ignoring…why? Because I feel like it? Because I'm a stupid little girl? Because you're so convinced of your own magnetism that you think it would somehow make me  _forget_  what you did to my brother; that I'm so busy contemplating throwing myself on your cock that I need  _you_ to remind me of what you've done; not  _now_ , please note, but at some ultimate, inevitable date in the future when it will just  _occur_ to me and make me hate myself! Pop!'

'Don't you dare mock me, little girl.'

'I will when you've been a stupid arse.'

'So that's what you think? That I left because I'm a "stupid arse'?'

'No. I think you hate yourself so much for what happened to Brienne that you think the rest of the world has an obligation to hate you too.'

Jaime glared at her with an intensity so violent it frightened her.

'You know  _nothing_ about what happened to Brienne,' he growled.

'So  _explain_  it to me,' she drawled in reply.

'Why do you care?' Jaime snapped.

'I told you about my ghost when you asked about him,' Arya shrugged.

Jaime looked away from her, then at her again; his anger transforming into a fragile kind of caution.

'You…you really want to know?'

Arya moved backwards off her haunches, sat down next to where he still lay on his back and crossed her arms. The skin of his hand was a bright, aching Lannister crimson, and he was opening his mouth and closing it again; as though unsure where to begin, or unwilling to begin at all. His missing thing was shimmering around him; she could feel hers welling up and acknowledging his, and he was opening his mouth, slowly, and beginning to speak.

'When I was Robb Stark's prisoner after the fuck-up at Whispering Wood,' Jaime began, 'Tyrion made a deal with your lady mother: behind your brother's back, of course.'

'She would never –'

'Ensure my release from captivity, and safe return to King's Landing,' he continued; ignoring her; 'and you and your sister would be sent back in exchange. She had no knowledge of your disappearance, of course, and it did not much plague Tyrion's conscience to keep it that way. So one evening, Lady Catelyn graciously pumped me full of as much wine as I could take without throwing up, and forced me to swear an oath –'

'She would  _never_!' Arya exclaimed in desperation.

'Will you stop interrupting me?' Jaime snapped.

Arya felt tears forming in her eyes. She didn't like thinking about her mother. She couldn't remember what she looked like.

'Arya –'

'Shut up. Keep talking.'

Jaime stared guiltily at his lap. He didn't apologise.

'Lady Catelyn, may the gods give her rest, made me drink an awful lot of frankly dreadful wine; made me swear a solemn vow never to take up arms against Stark or Tully again; and sent me off on my merry way chained to the most  _excruciatingly_  righteous, stubborn, irritating, unbearable wench that I had ever –'

'You loved her,' Arya interrupted.

'Seven hells, must I gag you?' Jaime snapped.

Arya rolled her eyes, bit her tongue, and looked slowly back at his face. It had softened at the memory.

'Now you must understand,' Jaime said, 'that she was no ordinary woman, Brienne. She was a good two inches taller than me, and wore armour, dagger and  _two_ bloody swords everywhere she went, all as if the  _lot_ didn't weigh a thing. And by all accounts, she was ugly. The first time I saw her, I wanted to die laughing. It was as if the gods had decided to consign her to misery before she was even born. And so, of course, she had built walls. At the beginning, I thought it might be… _amusing_  to break them down. By the end I was tearing at them with my fucking fingernails. Gods, we hated each other. We would argue day and night. She was utterly humourless and utterly innocent; her mind filled with ridiculous notions about chivalry, and the  _duty_ of every anointed knight to protect the weak, defend the innocent, blah blah blah. To make matters worse, she had a pair of…frankly glorious blue eyes that would  _shine_ whenever she talked or even  _thought_  about this bullshit. It was  _maddening_. You can  _imagine_ what she thought of me – for a good long while she wouldn't call me anything but 'Kingslayer.' So I devoted myself to making her miserable – I was bored, you understand – and all I really needed was to distract her for long enough to get my hands on one of her swords, cut her great thick throat and disappear. I managed it once…well, the first part.'

'What happened?' Arya asked.

'Let's just say that the results of that particular encounter were…mixed,' Jaime stammered.

'She beat the crap out of you.'

Jaime glared at her resentfully.

'Yes, alright, she beat the crap out of me. But I was weak from imprisonment –'

'I'm sure you were.'

'I was half-starved –'

'Gods, you're a shit.'

'She could have killed me. She  _would_  have killed me; she was certainly good enough. But we were captured before she got the chance, by a slimy fucking goat called Vargo Hoat and a collection of other oddities, freaks and mediocrities who somehow got it into their heads that it would be a spectacular idea to chop my hand off and hang it around my fucking neck.'

Jaime paused momentarily; the words slipping through his burnt fingers like rain as he looked into the darkness, and feared it.

'I lost…I wanted…I wanted to die. I  _prayed_  to die. And she wouldn't let me. Stubborn bloody wench. She wouldn't leave me alone for two seconds together; cleaning up my shit and my vomit and whispering a load of bullshit about revenge that she knew would make me want to live. She didn't  _have_  to do any of that. She'd led me to believe that she desired my death from the moment we met. And yet she did it until we reached Harrenhal, not because she had any particular regard for me, you understand, but because she would have done the same thing for  _any_  man in the same situation, whether he deserved it or not; she was  _exactly that sort of _fool, and…a part of me must have appreciated it, grudgingly at the very least, because when we eventually got to Harrenhal…, once the maester had cleaned me up, and I was half-dead from fucking pain, of course… I told her…'

'What?' Arya asked.

He was silent, and did not continue.

' _Jaime_ ,' she insisted.

But he was looking at her with a kind of fear in his eyes; a pleading to remain silent that was a part of what he had lost; a thing that he wanted to keep for himself; that like Arya's 'three lives I will give you,' couldn't fully be explained to anyone else, at least not yet…because it was his. His and his ghost's. She knew it. She understood it. And to her own surprise…she accepted it.

Jaime was looking intently at her, and seeing her thoughts in her face.

'Thank you,' he said softly.

Arya gave him a small, mute smile, and motioned to him to continue.

'Harrenhal,' Jaime muttered, 'was held at the time by Roose fucking Bolton, who got himself into such a panic at the prospect of my father's blaming  _him_ for my fucking hand, that instead of sending me back to your brother, he set me free. Brienne, too, after allowing Hoat to throw her into a pit with a dress, a bear, and a fucking tourney sword.'

' _Excuse_  me?'

'No maiden in the history of the world had ever been rescued  _quite  _so eventfully.'

'Now you're making this up!'

Jaime reached out, gingerly took her hand and placed his blistered fingers on top of hers. This time, she didn't slap him away.

'It was  _important_ , that fuck-up with the bear,' he said, 'because  _I_  was the one who decided to go back for her. True, I was almost a day's ride away from Harrenhal when it happened, but I still –'

'You  _left_ her there?' Arya screeched.

'I'm a bastard; as you're so fond of telling me,' Jaime pointed out, 'and bastard or not, I went back for her because I dreamt about her…about her and Cersei...Cersei left me in the dark, accursed be her memory; Brienne didn't, blessed be hers…it  _would_ turn out to be true, eventually, but even so, I didn't  _have_ to go back for her. I could have told myself that dreams were dreams and didn't mean anything; that her ransom would mean more to Hoat than an evening's entertainment. But what I realised, when I had that bloody dream, was that I still  _believed_ all that bullshit about honour and duty that I had ridiculed  _her_ for believing; that I believed it in spite of myself; in spite of  _not_ believing it at all.'

'Did the two of you get on better after that?' Arya asked.

'Not really,' Jaime remarked.

Arya rolled her eyes.

'Not  _really_?' she repeated.

'No,' Jaime snorted, laughing lightly, 'we fought all the way to King's Landing. And then when we  _got_  to King's Landing, the bells were tolling for good King Joffrey, and everything was falling apart. The Kingsguard was full to overflowing with halfwits and flatterers that Arthur Dayne would have drowned in the nearest privy sooner than allow them to take the white; Father's  _first words_  to me were to  _resign_ , marry and fuck trunkloads of golden-haired babies into Margaery Tyrell; and  _Cersei_ …' he snorted in derision, 'the endlessly obliging, glorious other half of her glorious fucking self had left her two years previously, and a broken cripple with his own mind had come back to her. You can  _imagine_ how that pleased her. Though I still loved the jumped-up bitch with all my heart and soul despite it. But now I'm forgetting about the wench.'

'That's a  _very_  rude thing to call her, you know,' Arya said.

Jaime glared at her.

'Sorry,' Arya mumbled.

He did not accept her apology.

'It was my lord father's idea of a joke to gift me with a Valyrian steel sword. My own fault, really. I'd assured the old bastard that I'd be able to fight again when I had absolutely no idea if it was true. But I was angry with him for trying to make me leave the Kingsguard, and I was angry at the wench for  _still_ treating me like the disreputable bastard that I was, so for a lark, I gave the sword to her and sent her off on a bit of a quest after your sister; it being obvious, at the time, that  _you_  were dead as a doornail. 'Sansa Stark is my last chance for honour,' I said, and off she went, biddable as a shepherd's dog, to find Sansa, return her to her mother and win my redemption for me. Gods, she was a fool. I still wonder that she didn't spit in my face and throw the entire suggestion right back at me. I wanted her to. I would never have admitted it, but I wanted her to. But she truly believed…in  _me._  I didn't understand it. Of course I was too much of an idiot to realise that she'd been hopelessly in love with me for months. A pair of eyes like that, and I didn't realise. But then I was too busy thinking of  _Cersei_  to think of anyone else.'

Jaime snorted in laughter.

'My sweet sister and I fell apart not long after Brienne left. Largely because Cersei seemed to have lost her fucking mind,  _and_  because I had unwittingly developed a sort of…allergy…that made tolerance of her bullshit more and more impossible from day to day. Eventually, she trundled me off to the Riverlands to deal with the Stark loyalists still dissenting after the Red Wedding. I began to train again, on the road, and it was a fucking joke. I might as well have been holding a wet fish in my hands, for all the good it did me. I thought about the wench from time to time…felt guilty from time to time…but for most of the time, my thoughts were largely with myself, with Cersei, and with my bloody left hand. Then one day…Brienne came to me. Well…was dragged to me would be nearer the mark. Bloody Freys. We were camped in the middle of nowhere, and she was just… _there_ ; as though it were nothing at all. She looked the same as ever – except that some creature appeared to have taken a few gigantic bites out of her cheek.'

'Biter?'

'You  _know_  him?'

'Once. Carry on.'

'I had never been… _so_  angry in the entire course of my life, when I heard about what had happened to her. She was talking to me all the while, saying something about your sister being nearby with the Hound, and that it was essential that I come alone…but I wasn't thinking about your sister. In my mind I was devising an entire series of gruesome and horribly painful deaths for  _Biter_ , even though he was dead already…the very  _thought_ of somebody  _doing that_ to her…I was ready to dig up his corpse, chop it into little bits and piss on it. I was violently angry  _for hours_  after we left. I was even angry at  _her_ for placing herself in such danger, when  _I_ was the bloody fool who had sent her out in the first place. It was only when I started berating  _myself_  that I realised that I loved her…but I didn't  _tell_  her, of course. I was too much of a fucking Lannister to do that…and I  _certainly_  didn't believe this sob story of hers: your sister, the Hound, 'come alone or the Hound will kill her.' Brienne could chop a man in half with her eyes closed, but she never learned how to lie. Nevertheless, I was intrigued, and mildly amused, and I was curious to see how long she could hold out before her conscience claimed her.'

Jaime's grip on Arya's hand tightened, and the smile faded from his face.

'We'd been riding for two days when she told me about… the Brotherhood without Banners,' Jaime said, his speech growing ever more hesitant, 'she'd been…captured, along with her squire and some bloody fool who wanted to marry her for her money, and she'd been required to…prove herself to… _them_ …by killing me, or be killed herself.'

Arya smiled at him and softly squeezed his hand.

'I appreciate the lie, but I already know about Stoneheart,' she said.

' _How?_ ' Jaime exclaimed, taken aback.

'Sansa,' Arya replied, 'during the conquest, she told me.'

Jaime remained silent; looking at her as though she were made of glass.

Arya spoke, not wanting to think about her mother.

'So Stoneheart took Brienne for an oathbreaker and told her to kill you or meet some suitably grisly end herself. What happened next?'

'Brienne refused to choose.'

'Oh, gods.'

'So they found a nice stout tree and prepared to hang her. Which the wench did not mind at all, you see. As I've said, she was the most dreadful imbecile. Then the bastards decided to string her squire up beside her, and hang  _him_  for her stupidity, so she duly swore to deliver me to Stoneheart and to cut my throat in exchange for his freedom. She couldn't ask anyone else to die for me, she said. Fair enough, but it still didn't stop me from wanting to clout her over the head and ask her why she hadn't sworn to kill me, then run for her life and let them  _have_  her bloody squire.'

'What did you do?'

'Nothing. I wasn't particularly hurt by her so-called betrayal, you understand. If anything, it was so typical of her that it made me want to laugh. And there were worse ways to die than impaled on the sword of such a woman. The wench didn't see it that way, of course. She thought she was the scum of the fucking earth; despite my efforts to convince her of the contrary; that, and of the fact that she didn't owe the Brotherhood, or Stoneheart, anything. But to her, breaking a vow to Stoneheart was the same as breaking one to Lady Catelyn. She didn't see…'

Jaime's face was growing paler and paler, and his grip on her hand was growing tighter.

'The night before she brought me to Stoneheart, she…told me that she loved me and we fucked,' he blurted in a rush, 'I didn't tell her that I felt the same way, though after some of the things I did to her that night, she would need to have the intelligence of a tadpole not to realise it. And then, when we eventually  _reached_ Stoneheart,  _after all that_ , the stupid, stubborn wench suffered a change of heart, and stuck her sword into Stoneheart's chest instead of mine.'

Jaime sucked in his breath like he'd been run through, and his fingers clutched Arya's so hard it hurt.

'The sword was useless in my hand,' Jaime growled, with a degree of self-loathing that Arya found unbearable, 'I could feel my fingers closing around the hilt, as I had a thousand times in my life…but they were the wrong fucking fingers. Nothing I did was…I couldn't fight…I couldn't… _feel_ , I…I couldn't defend  _myself_ , let alone her, I couldn't do…  _the one thing that I am good for_ , she…she killed…a lot of them…I managed to maim a few…but there were too many of the bastards…too many for us…'

Jaime's hand slipped out of Arya's and bunched cruelly in his hair; his eyes crumpling up like fuel for a fire.

'They beheaded her and made me watch,' he muttered, his voice…dead, 'they brought her head right up to my face and made me look at it. I wanted...I wanted to kill every last fucking one of them. Once upon a time, I could have. But there I was – helpless, without a fucking sword hand, watching her die, and hoping and praying that the bastards would kill me too. I wanted it more than revenge; more than…anything...but when they released her bloody squire – just to show me that  _they_ had upheld their end of the fucking bargain, you understand – the boy came for me. A simple, podgy little lad whom anyone in their right minds would send to a kitchen rather than a battlefield. He killed every guard on duty to get to me. He could fight. I couldn't.'

Jaime's eyes opened. They were blacker than hell.

'I've learned how to fight  _since then_ , of course. I couldn't stop myself, not with all… _that_ …in my head, not with Brienne screaming at me to run each time I shut my eyes; as though I would just  _leave_  her there. And why  _wouldn't_  she think that? I'd done it before, after all. So when I fight… _now_ …it's a punishment. It makes me feel dead. Because every time I put a sword in my hand, I'm reminded of the… _one person_  that I could have saved, had I only…she was…she was  _one-and-twenty_. A child. An innocent. And she died for me.  _Me._ There's no greater joke than that.'

Arya tentatively reached downwards to touch Jaime's shoulder. She ended up touching the back of his neck instead. It was boiling.

'Jaime, it wasn't –'

' _Don't you dare…_ tell me it wasn't my fault.'

'It wasn't your fault.'

Jaime looked pleadingly at her as though begging her to understand; his face a silent scream that murdered her slowly.

'I killed her in every way that fucking existed. I killed her by making her love me; by loving her too late; by not learning to fight fast enough; by thinking of no one fucking else but Cersei. If I'd been less wrapped-up in myself, I would have realised earlier, I would have married her, I would never have sent her away, and she would still be alive; I know she would, and…and I will be  _damned_  before I let the same thing happen to you.'

Arya stared at him; her heart tearing in her chest as Jaime continued.

' _That's_ why I left; when I realised that I hadn't changed at all; that I'd forgotten what I had done to your own blood. You might think differently about it now, or you might not. But someday, you will think about the way that I  _forgot_ about crippling your brother; the way that I had no reservations about kissing you  _a second time_  when I knew full well that the  _first_  bloody time left you branded like a slave. Someday you'll think about it, and you will hate yourself for thinking it was worth it. And  _that's_  only in the unlikely event of my not getting you killed first.'

Arya bent over and seized both Jaime's shoulders.

'If you were still who you were ten years ago, I'd hate myself for even talking to you,' she said, 'but you're not –'

'I'm the same bloody person that I was ten years ago,' Jaime told her impatiently.

'No, you're not,' Arya insisted.

'You seem very sure,' Jaime snorted, ' _why_?'

_Because anyone with eyes could see it; because I knew it the moment I saw you again; because I know it every time you look at me, or touch me; because knowing it is all of you and all of me._

'Because…I saw it. Back when I still knew how to see.'

Jaime was trying exceedingly hard to look at her like she was mad; every line in his face a mockery, a lie and a shield from what he had just told her. She wanted to shake him; to scream at him 'it's  _me_ ; why the fuck are you hiding from  _me_?' Then she saw the instinct of it in him, just as she always saw it in herself, and she was lying next to him and holding him before she could stop herself. Jaime's heartbeat drowned out half her hearing as she laid her head on his chest and wrapped herself around him. She could feel his limbs sinking slowly down into hers; his breathing ragged, and stirring the hairs on the top of her head, and sighing deeply with an exhausted,  grief-stricken relief as his burnt hand ghosted slowly to clasp her back and hold her against him.

'You don't deserve what you do to yourself,' Arya whispered.

'Neither do you,' Jaime whispered back; his voice breaking as his arms tightened around her back.

'If you really believe all that shit about yourself…if you left to protect me…then why did you come back?' Arya asked.

'Because I have shit for honour,' Jaime murmured.

Arya shrugged, closed her eyes and snuggled closer to him.

'That's alright. I do too.'


	21. Chapter 21

‘You…said this was meant to be a smuggler’s alcove?’ Jaime grinned, ‘are you entirely sure that you understand the concept of smuggling, Lady Stark?’

Jaime dodged as Arya aimed a punch at his shoulder, and Tyrion looked murderously out towards Dragonstone; rather wanting to strangle the pair of them and use their entrails for stirrups. In the short time since Jaime’s return, Tyrion had seen little else but long looks, shy smiles and lingering touches of fingertips, which was all very pretty, but for fuck’s sake, how could they keep fooling about like children when Rhaegal and Viserion were patrolling the skies above Dragonstone and proclaiming to all the world how Daenerys had escaped, and lived; when the sea around the island was crammed with so many ships that it more closely resembled a smiling, sinister shipyard than the ancestral seat of the Dragon Dynasty? Hundreds of ships bobbed cheerfully at anchor, side-by-side and near on top of one other; the air was filled with the shouts of lords, soldiers and smallfolk alike as they passed messages from ship to ship; and a large number of small but enterprising fishing boats were treading a dangerous-looking path through the enormous labyrinth of warships; plying their catch, or their daughters, depending on their scruples.

The fleet was immense; easily twice the number of ships that Stannis Baratheon had commanded at the Battle of the Blackwater. All the great nobility of the South, and most surprisingly, the North, was represented; every ship flying the Targaryen colours beside its House sigil; every ship implying mass desertion from Aegon’s cause.

Tyrion didn’t understand it. He could easily see why some sections of the Targaryen army – the Unsullied, the Dothraki, the Essosi freedmen – might choose to follow Daenerys rather than Aegon. But this…

_Something’s happened._

Arya and Jaime had already dismounted, and were setting off across the beach with no apparent destination in mind; their boots making clacking sounds against the pebbles as the pair of them loudly debated some no-doubt-pointless issue with a great deal of fervour; Jaime wincing each time he used his hand to gesticulate; Arya threatening to tie his arm down each time it happened.

Tyrion was spared further contemplation of their childishness by the sudden arrival of a patrol bearing the golden rose of House Tyrell. The soldiers surrounded Arya and Jaime in an appropriately intimidating fashion; their horses snorting and their swords gleaming, before falling back into ranks with what looked like disappointment as Loras Tyrell, resplendent in his white plate, emerged from their midst, commanded them to stand down, hurriedly dismounted, and seized Arya in a bear hug that went on for rather longer than was appropriate.

Tyrion snorted with laughter; both at that _and_ at the blatantly murderous look decorating Jaime’s face at the sight.

 _Perhaps our Ser Loras inclines both ways after all_ , Tyrion thought, _I should ask Varys about it…if I ever see him again._

‘Fish in a bag, m’lord?’ a small voice piped up, ‘it’s only two pennies, and they’s been cooked and everything.’

Tyrion, still mounted, looked down to see a small boy staring up at him; an islander, no doubt, judging by his scruffy silver hair…and an entrepreneur, judging by the net of anchovies in his left hand and the roll of cheap brown butcher’s paper in his right.

‘I fear I cannot accept, little lad,’ Tyrion replied, ‘anchovies make me shit for weeks on end.’

‘Me da says the same, m’lord,’ the boy enthusiastically agreed, ‘that’s why I decide to take ‘em and cook ‘em, and sell ‘em in a bag to the soldiers that like ‘em. I made me a whole silver stag the other day, and me da let me _keep_ it.’

‘He sounds like a very sensible man,’ Tyrion observed.

‘He is, m’lord,’ the boy replied, ‘when he ain’t drunk as a skunk.’

Tyrion stared at the boy and began to laugh.

‘Drunk as a _skunk_?’ he repeated.

‘Aye, m’lord,’ the boy insisted.

‘I didn’t know skunks could _get_ drunk,’ Tyrion protested.

‘Aye, m’lord, they can,’ the boy persisted, ‘I seen ‘em.’

Tyrion cocked an eyebrow at the lad.

‘You’ve _seen_ a drunken skunk?’

‘Aye, m’lord. Taverns is full of drunk skunks these days.’

Tyrion chuckled, decided that he liked the boy, and gave him a gold dragon. The lad’s eyes were turquoise, and guileless, and when they saw what Tyrion had just put in his hand, they grew to the size of saucers.

‘Thank – many thanks, m’lord,’ the boy stammered.

‘What is your name, lad?’ Tyrion asked.

‘Daemon, if it please m’lord,’ the boy replied.

‘Of course it is,’ Tyrion remarked; trying hard not to roll his eyes, ‘does your father have delusions of grandeur, by any chance?’

Daemon looked blankly at him.

‘I couldn’t say, m’lord,’ he admitted innocently, ‘I dunno what a delooshins of grander is.’

‘It is of little matter, Daemon,’ Tyrion chuckled, ‘now tell me. Is the sea around your island usually so crowded?’

‘No, m’lord,’ Daemon obligingly responded, ‘it only get like this after the Mad King burn the wolf lady.’

Tremours erupted in Tyrion’s blood and turned his heart to ash.

_The Mad King burned…he…she…no, it cannot be –_

‘No,’ Tyrion breathed, ‘no, he couldn’t have, surely he wouldn’t –’

‘Aye, m’lord,’ Daemon insisted, ‘me da tell me that he take a jar of wildfire, that Mad King, and he tip it over ‘er ‘ead. Wooooooosh!’

Tyrion resisted the urge to vomit, or weep, or laugh, and looked back across the beach to where the patrol stood; guilt paralysing him where he sat.

Loras was speaking softly to Arya, his face white and his hand on her shoulder; and Jaime was crouching down and holding her as she slumped to her knees, and screamed.


	22. Chapter 22

The motion of the boat rocking on the waves made Arya feel sick, so she sat slumped against Jaime’s shoulder with her eyes closed; his burnt hand boiling as it engulfed hers. She wondered if it hurt him; holding her hand. She tried to ask him, but she had no voice left.

The warships of Daenerys’ fleet reared up around their tiny boat like monsters: pieces on a cyvasse board that Sansa had put there.

Sansa.

Arya wanted to whimper her sister’s name; to call her back from the Nightlands; to howl for her shade, and for all her pack’s, because Sansa would be wherever they were.

But there was dry land instead, and Dragonstone. Stone halls. Torches in sconces, light, warmth; Jaime’s hand like an anchor in hers; holding her upright; holding her close…then darkness and grief as his fingers were ripped from her fingers, without warning, without words; but still she had no voice left; not even enough to call after him and ask what she had done to make him let her go.

‘ _Arya, please say something_ ,’ a gentle voice said, and she was sitting with Daenerys in a dark room above the sea; ships cluttering up the bay below like hungry wolves.

The queen was pale, sickly and very thin; a tiny drop of blood staining her gown at the place where her wound was still bleeding. In her small hands, she held a walking stick, which she gripped hard with fingers of steel; her eyes shimmering and turning lilac with anxiety at Arya’s silence.

‘Khaleesi…’ Arya mumbled; thinking that she ought to say something.

‘Arya, what has happened to you?’ the queen murmured, touching Arya’s cheek.

Arya thought _: my sister has been burned alive like a nice juicy mutton chop; what the fuck do you _think _has happened to me?_

Arya said: ‘did Aegon let my nephew live?’

Daenerys hesitated for a moment…then slowly shook her head.

The gesture made Arya turn red.

‘The Eyrie is supposed to be impregnable;  _how_ can he be dead?’ she stormed.

‘Arya, listen to me,’ Daenerys crooned, with the same insipid  _sweetness_  and  _sympathy_ that didn’t _mean anything;_ that wasn’t what Arya wanted.

She wanted to rage, and scream, and cry. She wanted to throw things. She wanted to stare at nothing for hours on end and not have to say a word.

She wanted Jaime.

‘Lord Eddard was assassinated by Varys’ spies at the Eyrie,’ Daenerys was telling her, oblivious, ‘when we received the news, we sent a bird to warn Lord Eddard’s protectors, but it was too –’

‘Eddard is the heir to half of Westeros!’ Arya raged, ‘capturing him guarantees the  _good behaviour_  of half of Westeros; Varys would never be stupid enough to kill him!’

‘Aegon would.’

‘What?’

‘When Aegon murdered your lady sister, he burned an entire wing of Maegor’s to the ground and also killed most of his own spies in the process. In consequence, the eunuch made him a gift of his little birds within the Red Keep; little knowing that he would demand control of the little birds  _outside_  the Red Keep as well.’

‘And Varys  _surrendered_ them?’

‘Apparently so.’

Arya slumped back in her seat; feeling sick and empty.

 _My sister is murdered by Aegon, her _son _ is murdered by Aegon, and Daenerys wins the allegiance of every House that has the slightest fear of serving another Mad King. The irony is fucking ridiculous._

‘Your Grace…’ Arya mumbled, ‘if the lords of Westeros fear the rule of another Mad King –’

‘Then why have they pledged allegiance to the daughter of one?’ Daenerys finished; not seeming particularly offended.

Arya contented herself with a respectful shrug.

‘After Lady Sansa’s passing,’ Daenerys admitted, with a certain sheepishness, ‘I…offered all the lords of Westeros absolution from their debts in exchange for their support.’

Arya smiled weakly at the queen’s discomfort.

‘Well-played, my queen,’ she remarked.

Daenerys, silent and avoiding her eyes, did not reply.

‘Will you give me leave to go tomorrow, Your Grace?’ Arya asked.

‘You intend to kill Aegon,’ Daenerys stated.

“Kill’ is a gentle word for what I plan to do, but yes,’ Arya conceded.

‘What if I commanded you to stay?’ Daenerys remarked sharply.

‘I would leave anyway,’ Arya told her; not even bothering to lie.

Daenerys stared at her.

‘You would betray your white cloak for an insect like Aegon?’

Arya shrugged, and did not reply.

‘You disappoint me, my lady,’ Daenerys sighed; taking hold of her walking stick and raising herself to her feet.

Arya stood, and helped Daenerys hobble over to a table in the centre of the room; the bloodstain on the queen’s gown growing larger and larger.

‘Never mind the bloodstain,’ Daenerys cavalierly declared when she noticed Arya’s concern; ‘now come here and see.’

A map of King’s Landing was spread out across the surface of the table, and with it, a battle plan that was vastly different from anything Arya had yet seen on a Targaryen campaign and yet familiar enough to prevent her from immediately seeing why. Dozens of model ships infested the waters of Blackwater Bay, legions of tiny soldiers lingered immobile on blood red battle lines, and on top of the Red Keep was placed a single iron coin…

Arya’s eyes snapped upwards to Daenerys’.

‘Tomorrow,’ the queen declared, ‘I sail for King’s Landing to retake my throne. My troops will secure the city under cover of darkness while you, our Faceless Man, will infiltrate Maegor’s Holdfast and restrain Aegon in whichever way you see fit. Once the city is ours, he will be brought to trial –’

‘To  _trial_?’ Arya screeched in disbelief.

‘Calm yourself, Lady Stark,’ the queen gravely pronounced; glaring at her, ‘honour demands that he be tried in the sight of the gods.’

‘Honour does  _not_ demand it!’ Arya hissed, ‘he threw away whatever right he had to be treated with  _honour_ when he –’

‘Would you turn yourself into the next Kingslayer merely out of a desire for a quicker revenge?’ Daenerys snapped.

‘I would be honoured to be mentioned in the same  _breath_  as the  _Kingslayer_ ,’ Arya snarled while Daenerys glared imperiously at her; clearly deciding whether or not she should be locked up for treason.

_I don’t care, I don’t fucking care, I am so sick and tired of lying, and grieving, and hiding; throw me in a cell if you must, sentence me to fucking death, but I will still cut Aegon’s throat myself._

Daenerys was looking down at the map again;  _what_ is  _so different about that bloody battle plan_ , Arya thought,  _it must be obvious, why aren’t I seeing it_; and the queen was regally clearing her throat and examining the map as though nothing had happened.

‘Aegon  _will_  be put to trial,’ the queen declared, ‘when he is found guilty, and he will be, you will be my wrath, and administer the queen’s justice to this false, Blackfyre king.’

‘Can I choose the manner of his demise?’ Arya bluntly enquired.

‘What in the name of all the gods has  _happened_ to you?’ Daenerys demanded.

Arya shrugged. Daenerys gave her a withered look.

‘I should hang you for your impertinence, but yes,’ Daenerys said, ‘though please do me the courtesy of choosing a punishment that can be administered quickly, and in public: no starving to death; no lopping off one limb per day until there’s nothing left; I want him dead and I want him dead soon; is that understood?’

‘Yes, Khaleesi,’ Arya said.

Arya looked absent-mindedly down at the map once more, and with a jolt, she realised what had changed.

‘No dragons, Khaleesi?’ Arya hesitantly ventured; looking pointedly up at the queen.

‘No,’ Daenerys replied shortly, ‘fire and blood are all very well, but…I find that I no longer share my dear husband’s taste for burning things.’


	23. Chapter 23

Jaime had never heard anything like the scream that had ripped from Arya’s throat at the news of Sansa’s death: the loneliness inside it; the agony, the realisation that she was completely, completely alone. He knew all three emotions too well to flatter himself that there was anything he could do to make it better. And yet the crossing over to Dragonstone had been worse, much worse: a death rattle of screaming silence and helplessness as Arya had sat slumped against him like a mute, exhausted sack of nothingness; her spine bent; her body limp; her voice silent; and he had wanted to wrap himself tightly around her and carry her body inside his, so that he could bear this for her, or at least with her. He had held her hand instead, and she had clutched at his, hard: hurting him, but not enough to make him let her go. Then they had reached the castle, and she’d been taken away to see the queen, and when her hand had been uncaringly ripped out of his; leaving what had felt like a gaping void between his fingers, she hadn’t protested, or even looked at him; so he had taken himself angrily off to the maester to get his hand treated and bandaged, and had been hard pressed to prevent himself from punching the old fool when it was venerably concluded that his hand would heal in a matter of months, but only if he used it as little as possible.

 _That doesn’t make much fucking sense,_ Jaime had thought, _every man within a hundred miles is going to be sailing off to war one of these days, and he tells me not to use the only hand that I have left? What does he imagine I’ll do in battle? Head-butt every enemy that gets in my way?_

He had fumed about that all the way down to the bathhouse, and for every moment that he had sat staring at his toes in the hot water; half-expecting to see Brienne scowling opposite him; her bright blue eyes seeking out both the brush and soap and debating whether or not she’d do much damage if she lobbed them both at his head. The wench did not put in an appearance, however, and it was only when Jaime rose from the water – and started at the discovery that some invisible squire had taken his clothes away and left him with new ones – that he heard the voices in the next room, some that he recognised, some that he didn’t, discussing the queen’s strategy for the taking of King’s Landing. Jaime had half a mind to go in there and bang their heads together for discussing tactics in the fucking _bathhouse_ of all places, especially with so many little birds about, before ‘Lady Arya’s to sneak in and restrain him,’ one of them said. And the world was spinning around him and fear suffocating his heart in his chest at the thought of her right arm that had been disfigured and ruined; of her face that was so different now from the Faceless, expressionless mask she had worn in his early days of knowing her, and he was pulling on a shirt and breeches without bothering to dry off, and seizing the first servant he saw by the throat and demanding to know which stinking pile of stone that evidently-blind dragon bitch of a queen had put her in for the night.

The stinking pile of stone turned out to be some enormous draughty chamber at the top of a tower with some twenty two million fucking stairs, and when he eventually reached the fucking door and knocked on it, feeling as though his bloody lungs were about to cave in, the response was predictably discouraging.

‘Go away!’ Arya shouted.

Jaime ignored her, and opened the door anyway.

She was leaning against the open window; her posture suggesting that she’d been retching out of it, and when she slammed it shut, turned and glared at him, Jaime’s breath caught in his throat.

She looked beautiful. She’d thrown her Kingsguard whites (now so dirty that they might more properly be called her Kingsguard blacks) into a crumpled pile on the floor, and put on an ancient-looking bed robe that hugged her form like a lover. Her hair, freshly-washed, tumbled gloriously down her back like a starless sky; her face was beautifully flushed, and alive, and resolved, and he wanted to tell her that she couldn’t go after Aegon; that he’d kidnap her and lock her up if that was what it took to stop her, but all that he could think about was his sudden, aching, uncomfortable  awareness that he could see every small, fragile line of her body in the folds of her robe, and that he wanted to kiss every single one of them; from the curve of her breasts right down to her ankles.

 _Seven hells, get a fucking_ hold _on yourself_ , he thought, growing embarrassingly hard and praying to all the gods at once that she wouldn’t notice.

‘Does ‘go away’ mean something different in the West?’ Arya was demanding.

‘Well _you_ sound better,’ Jaime shot back, closing the door behind him.

‘I’m _fine_ ,’ Arya drawled, ‘I’m just not used to being so bloody _emotional_ all the time; it really is the most draining – ’

‘Please don’t go after Aegon,’ Jaime blurted in a rush.

Arya’s face softened for a moment; her eyes transforming from Valyrian steel to autumn rain, and she glanced hesitantly through her eyelashes at the open neck of his shirt and at the damp, dishevelled state of him, before flushing in embarrassment, and promptly beginning to argue.

‘If you’re here to talk bullshit to me, then please fuck off while you still can,’ Arya snapped, glaring at him and blushing still further when her nipples hardened, tight and excruciatingly visible, against the fabric of her robe.

‘You’re the only one here who’s fucked, Lady Stark,’ Jaime retorted, making a further genteel effort to control his arousal, ‘you’ve lost your Facelessness and you can barely use your right arm; will you _please_ explain to me how you intend to do _anything_ to Aegon without getting yourself killed?’

‘I have to restrain a friendless, army-less king in a ruined castle in a ruined city,’ Arya snorted, pointedly crossing her arms, ‘it’s not exactly as complex a job as killing the Sealord of Braavos.’

‘So how are you going to go about accomplishing this ‘simple job’?’ Jaime mockingly asked; his temper flaring dangerously, ‘fly over the walls, hop in through Aegon’s window and hope he doesn’t drench you in wildfire too?’

‘Get out!’ Arya yelled.

‘The man has lost his _mind_!’ Jaime shouted.

‘So _what?_ ’Arya shouted back.

‘If he sees you,’ Jaime said, trying hard to remain calm, _remember how young she is,_ ‘ _he will kill you_ , and that’s only if he doesn’t rape and torture you first.’

‘He won’t see me, because he’ll be _asleep!_ ’ Arya countered, ‘that’s why the attack’s happening at _night_ , stupid. When people are _asleep_.’

‘ _Asleep?_ ’ Jaime furiously repeated, ‘Aegon is a fucking _lunatic_ ; he doesn’t _sleep_!’

‘How do _you_ know?’ Arya flippantly demanded.

‘I have experience with the sleep patterns of lunatics!’ Jaime roared.

 ‘I _forgot_ ,’ Arya drawled.

‘Good for you!’ Jaime snapped, ‘but I _do_ happen to know what I’m talking about, so let me tell you something about what’s going on inside the mind of Aegon mad-as-fuck Targaryen –’

‘ _Blackfyre_ ,’ Arya corrected, as nonchalantly as though they were discussing the weather; and it might have been her tone, or the fact that she didn’t seem to give a fuck whether she lived or died, but whatever it was, it made him so fucking angry that he could hardly see what he was doing as he stormed towards her, seized hold of her wrists and shoved her roughly into the opposite wall; his burnt hand cupping her chin, hard, and forcing her to look at him.

He expected her to fight. She didn’t; calmly resting the back of her head against the wall and glaring fearlessly up at him with those infernal fucking grey eyes as though she were the one imprisoning _him_ ; the space between their bodies an inferno; the breath pulsing from her lungs as hard and hot as wildfire; which of course only served to make him more furious at her pig-headed bloody stubbornness.

‘Right now,’ Jaime stormed; his nose inches from Arya’s, ‘I can assure you that Aegon Targaryen or Aegon Blackfyre, or whatever the fuck his name is, is _convinced_ that every person in his service is trying to kill him: his guards, his advisors, his friends, the boy emptying his chamber pot; the girl sucking his cock; _all of them_. The idea is settling down in his head, taking root, getting bigger and bigger, and more and more dangerous, and before long he’ll be outlawing knives and scissors and burning anyone caught with one in their dinner sets or sewing boxes. To him, the rest of the _world_ is fucking crazy: _he_ is the victim; _he’s_ the one being persecuted; _the world_ needs to pay for what is happening to him. That’s why he killed Sansa. And when he sees you, and _he will_ see you, all of that will come tearing out of him at once; he’ll see it as confirmation of _all_ his suspicions, he’ll be reminded of the thousand-and-one times that you’ve rejected his royal advances, and when those two things come together in his head, the seven gods together will not be able to do a thing to save you.’

‘And what would you do, if you were me?’ Arya raged; her voice breaking, ‘if your entire family had been fucking massacred, and some cunt like Aegon had taken a jar of wildfire and poured it over Tyrion’s head, burned the last person of your blood alive like some piece of meat? If it had happened to you, _would you let some stranger do your killing for you?_ ’

‘Of course I bloody wouldn’t!’ Jaime bellowed.

‘So _why are we fighting_?’ Arya demanded.

In his mind, he was still yelling; telling her that she was wrong; that she was too injured and too alive to do this; telling her that she’d almost certainly be killed; telling _himself_ that he had come here to convince her that she was _wrong_ , not to end up agreeing with her. Instead, he was pulling her against him, she was seizing the back of his head, and their lips were colliding; Arya’s mouth sinking deeply into his as he crushed his lips to hers, desperate, delirious, right; his hands moving slowly down her body, flesh and blood and gold as she opened her mouth for his tongue, and groaned beneath the taste and touch of him; and suddenly they were doing what they should have done; what they had both wanted to do; what he knew they had both thought of doing from the second that he had ripped back the balcony curtain in the great hall of the Red Keep, and she had lowered her flagon of wine, and looked at him.

Arya’s hands pulled hot and feverish at his laces as he laid one of her shoulders bare and softly devoured it with his mouth, and she was gasping, and burying her lips in his hair, and walking him back, and further back, and pushing him down into bed. Her tongue and her smile filled his mouth, and left the taste of them sweet and lingering on his lips as she divested him of his shirt and breeches with a speed that rather alarmed him, until he remembered that she wasn’t a maiden; not in love and not in life, and that that was one of the countless reasons why he loved her: because she _knew_ without pretending to know; because she knew when others could only ask, or wonder.

Arya sat perfectly still in his lap, her breathing hitching and her eyes burning as she patiently endured every clumsy, blundering, inept move that his single, useless hand made to undo the knot that bound her robe together, and as her nakedness began to emerge; Jaime’s hand peeling her robe away from her left shoulder, and from her damaged, bound-up right; the world began to change into a place that was shaped like her; like her sad, human face and her wide, expressive mouth, like her fragile, birdlike shoulders, like her small breasts with their hard, pink nipples, like her firm, masculine stomach, like the feast of brown curls at the juncture of her thighs; and with newness and beauty came the memory, the shame and the anger that he was too much of a bloody cripple to even undress her properly, and that his own body was a thing so scarred and so broken that no one in their right minds would want to touch it, or even see it. The bloody Targaryens had seen to that.

Arya was doing a good job of not noticing anything; looking silently down into his eyes and not at the horrendous bloody scars that decorated his torso; her small hands tracing the scars on his face like patterns in the sand as he clumsily struggled with her clothing; her voice sighing softly each time he touched her with so much as a fingertip; and when the bloody robe finally fell away from her, and left him with only his skin and hers, she didn’t move, or kiss him, or touch him. And he found that he didn’t blame her.

She continued to stare intently at him, at his eyes and nothing else; frozen above him with her summer snow skin that looked unblemished despite her own scars; and he started to babble something clever about how they should stop, shake hands and pretend that this had never happened; how he couldn’t reproach her for being repulsed on what was, after all, only the second time that she saw his scars; not when he himself avoided mirrors like the plague and could barely see himself in them without retching.

Then she bent over and softly pressed her lips to the jagged, sunken hole of burnt flesh above his left breast, and he was gasping and crying out under the weight of such a powerful surge of arousal that his bones seemed to melt to nothingness inside him and shatter his veins with his own heartbeat.

‘You think I care less about your stupid scars?’ Arya demanded, pressing her lips greedily to his and kissing him breathless until he moaned for release, and then her hands were moving slowly across his ruins, and her mouth was following them: all of her lips, all of her tongue, all of her teeth, kissing and drinking and tasting his chest, his sides, his stomach and every single fucking scar that disfigured them as though they were made of wine, not broken skin. His fingertips glided softly up her spine and into her hair; and she was kissing, and sighing, and touching, and gasping against him until her name was appearing in the centre of every breath that escaped him; until every breath that escaped him became fast, short, non-bloody-fucking-existent; until he was squirming beneath her like some maiden on her wedding night, biting hard on his bottom lip and sincerely trying to prevent himself from coming all over the sheets as Arya kissed his mouth again; gently, this time, and followed the scars on his face from his forehead down to his beard; her lips like fiery whispers on his skin and sweetly suffocating him with their touch.

Jaime looked up into Arya’s grey gaze, and gently framed her face with his hands, one golden, one flesh and blood. She smiled at him. His burning fingers traced her hairline, and her cheekbones, and her jaw; then his lips did the same; and he wanted to bury his lips in every last inch of her skin, and sleep there, in the scent of her. He wanted to tell her that. He tried to; whispering ‘you are…’, then nothing, because there wasn’t a word for what she was, and Arya was kissing him softly and letting out a yelp of surprise as Jaime seized her hips, yanked her against him, flipped her over and showed her.

Her tongue was hot in his mouth as he rolled his slowly and beautifully against hers, and felt it growing warmer with the taste of the groans that rose in the back of her throat while his hands, touching her skin, tangled deeply and impossibly with her hands, touching his. And he couldn’t see or feel anything but her; she was the whole world; and her smell, and her smile, and the heat of her skin, and the wetness of her cunt, and the _sounds_ she was making as his mouth travelled languidly down her neck and throat and kissed the tip of one nipple with his tongue; her fingers combing through his hair, then bunching in his hair as she whispered his name and muttered to herself in a language that he didn’t understand; probably Braavosi, and –

‘What was that, Lady Stark?’ Jaime grinned; thoroughly flattered by the idea of being so good that she could forget the Common Tongue.

‘Bite… _harder_ ,’ Arya snarled; glaring up into his eyes and clearly guessing his thoughts.

Jaime smiled against her flesh and had no mercy on her; circling each of her nipples slowly with his tongue and licking at them while she swore, blasphemed and spitefully pulled his hair; mischievously arching her back and moaning in satisfaction when his teeth sank momentarily into her breast, then growling loudly in frustration and hissing as Jaime wrapped his arms around her waist and glided his lips softly and persistently away from where she wanted them, up and up, until he reached her neck again, and kissed it, open-mouthed, as though he were kissing her lips.

‘You…are…killing…me,’ Arya half-mewled, half-snarled; half-desperation, half-want as her neck arched beneath his mouth, ‘you’re killing me; you’re killing me; _you’re killing me_ –’

‘So _yield_ ,’ Jaime growled; his teeth grazing the skin at the nape of her neck, and gracelessly releasing her as she seized roughly hold of his thighs and thrust against him, once, so hard and so unexpectedly that he almost came apart at the fucking seams from the effort of containing himself –

‘ _You_ yield,’ Arya hissed, her eyes like Valyrian steel; _I’m not going to last much longer if she keeps doing that_ ; and her shoulders were covered in scars, and her mouth was gasping into his and giving him breath shaped like his own name, and his body was covering hers as they sank slowly back down into the mattress, and down into the place that was her, where he could burn at the stake without dying; where dragonfire couldn’t touch him, or her. Her eyes were turning his to grey just as his were turning hers to green; his cock was straining, slick and hard, at her entrance; she was grasping his buttocks with both her hands and pulling him harder against her; and they were crying out together as he thrust into her; their breathing a frenzy; their bodies trembling feverishly against each other; their voices sighing out each other’s names as Arya wrapped her legs tight around his waist and slowly pulled him deeper into her, until their faces were inches apart, and they could watch each other burn.

They fucked slowly at first; tenderly, maddeningly; Arya’s hips beating languidly up to each long, individual thrust he made inside her in a way that was fucking glorious, but too bloody unbearable to be worth it. He fucked faster, and harder, but her thrusts only grew slower, and deeper, and more and more stubborn, and more…bloody… _gods_ …until Jaime was moaning in miserable frustration at every slow, passionate, unbearable roll of her hips, and Arya was smiling wickedly up at him with her grey eyes glowing– probably getting back at him for earlier, the little minx:

‘Ready to apologise yet?’ she asked, craning her neck and biting his bottom lip.

_Fuck it._

‘ _Yes_.’

‘ _Show me._ ’

Her eyes closed and her lips parted as he plunged into the heat between her legs and felt her urging her hips rapidly up to his to fuck him faster; she was biting on her tiny wolf teeth in an expression of frustration that was so utterly arousing that he was sure she had no idea she was doing it; _I’m not saying a fucking word about it_ ; and she was opening her eyes again and pulling his gaze inside her as she drove her hips harder into his and dug her nails into his thighs and begged him, ‘Jaime, do it… _harder,_ for _fuck’s_ sake!’

Jaime grinned breathlessly, and obliged.

‘Like this, Lady Stark?’

‘ _Seven fucking…_ hells _, yes_ –’

‘Like this?’

‘ _Yes!_ ’

She was coming apart in his arms and holding him and frantically kissing his lips each time her nails dug too deep, and her grey gaze was mesmerising him and enflaming him as the place that was her became the place that was both of them. Their bodies and minds boiled and seared and melted together until every pore in every place that they touched bled total fucking nigh-unbearable ecstasy, and the pain of it was exquisite as they gasped and moaned and loved as though they were the only two people for a hundred miles; and he didn’t give a fuck if the entire castle could hear them: what they were doing was beautiful, _her name_ was beautiful, and if he wanted to moan it twenty-five fucking times then he didn’t care a shit what anyone else thought about it, or him, and the woman who had a name; who _belonged_ to her name; the woman who had woken him up; the girl that he had wanted to kill and had chosen to save; _If I had killed her, if I had done it, just the thought of it, I can’t, I can’t_ think; ‘Jaime,’ Arya was moaning; close; ‘ _Jaime_ ’; and he was sliding a hand between her thighs and touching her; and she was screaming for him and he for her as they slammed hard into release, together, and every inch of love, or desire, or good that he had ever felt was incarnating and roaring and spilling and fucking into the fragile, scarred, _everything_ body and mind and heart that was her; and the heat was roaring higher instead of dying as their hips thrust harder together and made their voices better, redder, and turned everything around them to fields of searing, burning ice that hurt like all seven hells put together: beautifully, enough to turn his eyes to rain and Arya’s to molten silver as she clung to him and sobbed; buried close and deep within him the way that he was buried in her.

He clutched harder at Arya’s fingers, and she at his; their hands bunching together in the nape of his neck as the ice blew away from them in a slow, agonising fall; as air, earth, the world, slowly pulled their skins and minds out of each other, and made them two people again.

Jaime felt his head collapsing onto Arya’s chest, and her hands pulling away from his and stroking weakly at his hair. Her breath enveloped her body as it rose and fell beneath his; he could feel it in his own lungs even now, and as he listened to the sound of her breathing, hitched, ragged, deep; no slowness; no restraint; he softly closed his eyes and fell down into her heartbeat.


	24. Chapter 24

In the night, Arya had dreamed of Sansa.

Her sister had sat before a mirror braiding her own hair; sobbing, then screaming as every strand turned slowly and horribly to wildfire. Her hands and face had begun to blister, and her bones to show through her flesh, and the restraints binding Arya’s hands and legs had been made of Valyrian steel that sawed at her skin as she fought to free herself; to reach her sister in time.

But Sansa’s body had already erupted into a pillar of helpless, eternal, towering flame that had screamed with a human voice as it writhed and fought and fled; only speeding up its own immolation, and Arya was bolting out of bed as she awoke, and wrenching open the window, and retching, and choking, and crying because nothing was coming out; the horror was in her, _in her_ ; trapped inside her naked skin.

She could still hear her sister screaming; she was clapping her hands over her ears to make her stop; then hands made of flesh, blood and gold were softly touching her shoulders and turning her around, and Jaime was enfolding her in his warmth; his embrace warmer than the heat of a thousand suns. She could feel his lips brushing her ear as he shushed her and filled her up with wordless light; she was sobbing his name into his chest and clutching him, afraid that he would vanish if she let him go; and ‘you’re not there, my love,’ Jaime had whispered, ‘you’re here, with me.’

He had scooped her up and carried her back to bed as though she were a child; holding her softly against him and kissing her tears away as they ran down her cheeks. And he was scarred like she was, and beautiful like she wasn’t; his body a sinewed, muscled, golden ruin of hardness and life; his bandaged hand caressing one cheek while his lips caressed the other and trailed fire from her eyelids to her jaw; brushing at her temples long after the last tear had fallen, and ‘oh gods, ignore it, just _ignore_ it,’ Jaime groaned apologetically; shifting slightly away from her when his cock twitched suddenly between them; harder than a tree branch and apparently independent-minded as well.

Arya snorted with laughter, and earned herself a sullen glare, then a sheepish smile as she lifted her hand to touch Jaime’s cheek; her fingers rustling against the coarse silver of his beard as her other arm snaked around his waist and pulled him against her once more; her breath aching and sighing and stopping as her lips brushed softly against his. Jaime’s fingers stroked slowly against her cheek as his tongue edged into her mouth and flicked gently against hers; retreating almost immediately as he took her bottom lip between both of his and kissed it softly; nipping gently at the skin without once using his teeth.

His tenderness was making her wet. He was half on top of her now; his chest and stomach pressed against hers; her fingers gripping his thigh and imprisoning his right leg between both of hers. Her lips were touching his, then caressing them, then devouring them; ‘Arya,’ Jaime gasped, ‘ _Arya, I –_ ’; and the heat was surging violently between her legs as she seized hold of his waist and pulled his fragility against hers while she kissed him; her hands moving down his sides to the mysterious, calloused skin of his inner thighs; her fingers stroking his cock while his fingers stroked her breasts; and their moans and their tongues were moving in a frenzied dance that made her kiss harder; hold harder; love deeper; and when her hands guided him inside her and she felt him there, with her, she whispered, ‘Jaime, I want _you_ ,’ because they belonged to each other, and had done since the beginning.

Jaime’s gaze locked with hers; wild in its emerald stillness; his face closeness and togetherness and everything as ‘I am yours, and you are mine,’ he whispered; his damp eyes moving inside her soul like his body was moving inside her body, and she had never felt so close, so achingly right with another human being as –

‘So what do you think?’ Loras insisted.

Arya blinked at her watch partner from her position outside Daenerys’ cabin door.

‘About what?’ she asked.

Loras tsked in annoyance at her abstraction and punched her in the shoulder.

‘Can you guard the queen this afternoon while I attend to some necessary business?’ he repeated.

‘What’s his name?’ Arya asked.

‘ _Why don’t you shout a bit louder?_ ’ Loras exclaimed; flashing her a distinctly naughty look and adding: ‘impossible as that may seem, after screaming all night.’

‘ _Loras_!’ Arya screeched; blushing to the roots of her hair as the Knight of Flowers threw himself theatrically against the opposite wall and began to rub himself through his trousers with a little too much enthusiasm, chanting:

‘Jaime, _Jaime_ , oh gods, yes, _Jaime…_ do it harder _,_ _harder, HARDER,_ oh… _oh_ … oh yes…oh love, yessssss… oh gods… oh _fuck_ , _yes_ ; like that, _just_ like that…Jaime, _Jaime, **Jaime**_ **,** _JAIME_ – ’

‘ _SHUT UP!_ ’ Arya shouted; clouting Loras so hard around the head that his helmet fell off.

He didn’t seem to mind; grinning at her and giving her a good-natured shove as she stared furiously at her boots and tried hard not to blush any further.

‘Did the whole castle hear?’ Arya truculently enquired.

‘Only the north wing,’ Loras triumphantly announced, picking his helmet up, ‘how fast _the others_ find out depends on whether or not you –’

‘I’ll take your stupid duty,’ Arya snapped.

‘Thank you!’ Loras sang, extravagantly kissing her cheek and dashing away as the cabin door swung open, and Daenerys limped slowly out into the corridor.

Just looking at her made Arya feel angry.

‘What on earth is going on out here?’ the queen stiffly enquired.

‘Loras was cleansing himself of some pent-up frustration, Your Grace,’ Arya replied; pulling the door closed and stepping up to her place behind the queen as Daenerys began to hobble down the corridor on her walking stick like some bad-tempered old crone.

‘Loras _did_ seem a little forlorn this morning,’ Daenerys observed; a sting of resentful dragonfire in her voice, ‘you,on the other hand, look positively _radiant_ , Lady Stark. Can I take it that you slept well?’

‘Perfectly well, I thank Your Grace,’ Arya courteously droned; giving Daenerys her arm as they ascended the narrow flight of steps that led to the ship’s deck, and dropping it as soon as she could.

Arya retreated to her traditional, silent position at the queen’s back while Daenerys limped up and down the deck like a martyr; greeting her men and asking after their health, leaning heavily on her walking stick, and gazing wistfully up at the bleak blue skies where Rhaegal and Viserion were amusing each other and frightening the wits out of everybody else. Arya almost asked what the dragons were doing here, it having been determined that dragon warfare would _not_ be used in this particular campaign, but if she did _that,_ then the conversation might very well turn to Drogon, or to the ‘mystery’ of how the dragons had escaped, or even to the enigmatic, too-bloody-dangerous-to-reveal ‘proof’ of Aegon’s lineage (non-existent, of course) that her masters had told her to mention to Daenerys on the day of her acceptance into the Queensguard; and Arya had no intention of mentioning _any_ of those things until Aegon’s corpse was rotting safely in the ground, being raped by worms. A day or two made little difference in a life doomed to eternal dishonour.

‘Arya,’ Daenerys suddenly proclaimed, stopping abruptly in her tracks and almost causing her Queensguard to trip over her, ‘would you be so kind as to wait for me on the quarterdeck? I’m sure we can trust Rhaegal and Viserion to incinerate any seagulls that get too close for comfort.’

Arya peered curiously over Daenerys’ shoulder, and complied with a small smile.

Tyrion was standing in their path.

 

* * *

 

Tyrion heard himself say something to make the uncomfortable silence go away. It could not have been particularly awe-inspiring, whatever it was, because Daenerys was at present hanging her head in a manner highly suggestive of a desire to translocate to the bottom of the sea.

‘I am….relieved, and…happy…that you are alive,’ she said; hesitation marring the sickly beauty of her face, ‘but –’

‘But I acted like a patriarchal little bastard and you can never forgive me?’ Tyrion blurted.

Daenerys, still staring at the floor, said nothing.

‘Why, then, did things get as far as your sending poor Arya on a suicide mission by commanding her to find me?’ Tyrion pushed.

‘It’s Arya’s _duty_ to do what I tell her,’ his silver queen rigidly replied; steadfastly avoiding his eyes and making his heart sink. He knew himself to be thoroughly deserving of every inch of coldness or rejection that Daenerys could throw at him, but he could not, however, suppress his indignation that the queen could so easily discount Arya’s actions in the name of something so trivial as saving face. Her fucking _orders_ had sent Arya to the very edge of the seventh hell, even if she _had_ sworn an oath to frequent such distasteful locales on her queen’s command.

‘It might very well have been Arya’s _duty_ to find me,’ Tyrion ventured, ‘but we should not forget that she did so at great personal –’

‘Tyrion,’ Daenerys quickly scoffed, ‘sweetling. You and I both know, especially after last night, that her going back for _you_ was only incidental.’

‘Is that such a terrible thing?’ Tyrion asked.

‘Forgiven your brother, have you?’ Daenerys sneered.

‘No,’ Tyrion snapped, _but everything that I hate about him disappears when he speaks of her,_ ‘but I’m alive. Under the circumstances, I don’t much care why.’

‘Her violation of her vows does not offend you, then?’ Daenerys righteously demanded.

‘Not when the only one to blame for it is you,’ Tyrion scoffed.

‘ _Me_?’ Daenerys repeated; her eyes flashing.

‘Have you _really_ never thought about it?’ Tyrion stormed; unable to believe his ears, ‘ _you’re_ the one who insisted on trying to ‘wake her up’ the moment she entered your service. You could have left her as No one, and she would probably have been happier that way. But no! Daenerys Stormborn has to be a _saviour_ as well as a conqueror, even if the person on which you choose to lavish your mercy has no desire to be saved. So you irritate her and you pester her with things that she would rather not remember; you congratulate yourself on ‘turning her into a human being;’ on giving her ‘feelings,’ when everyone with eyes in their heads can clearly see that all you’ve done is pull her _halfway_ and put her on the edge of a knife that could cut her at any moment –’

‘Thank you for your poetic candour, Lord Tyrion.’

‘– then my brother comes along and does what you failed to do, and you _curse_ her for it? Perhaps you and Aegon have more in common than I thought!’

‘Aegon and I have _nothing_ in common!’

‘Really? Both of you seem remarkably eager to condemn people – most especially _her_ , I might add – based on who they do or don’t fall in love with. I can think of no other reason why you would refuse to allow Jaime to come to King’s Landing and fight. Was it your idea not to tell Arya until we’d set sail?’

Daenerys gave him a long look, and her ‘righteous messiah, saviour of mankind’ face.

‘Ser Jaime cannot fight when his only remaining hand is so badly injured,’ she said.

‘You fear that Arya’s pretty little head will be so filled with thoughts of him that she’ll fuck up her mission,’ Tyrion snorted; the performance not fooling him for an instant.

Daenerys put both her soft white hands on the railing and looked out to sea in what she clearly thought was an impressive gesture.

‘I cannot have her distracted,’ she declared.

‘You’ve done nothing but ensure that she _will_ be distracted,’ Tyrion told her, ‘especially with her Facelessness in the state that it is. But if I said that that actually _bothered_ you, then I’d be lying, wouldn’t I?’

‘ _You_ would have done precisely the same thing were it not for this starry-eyed faith in her judgment that you seem to have acquired overnight,’ Daenerys retorted; her head snapping to the side to face him.

‘Are you _jealous,_ my queen?’ Tyrion grinned; thoroughly pleased by the idea.

‘Is there something to be jealous _about_?’ Daenerys replied; a hint of wrathful spite in her voice.

Tyrion’s grin turned sour at how little she understood.

‘I love that girl,’ he said, ‘I adore her. She has a kinder heart and a nobler spirit than any one of the thousands who claim to serve you by kissing your arse and never telling you the twentieth part of the truth. And she would lay down her life for _you_ at a moment’s notice; something that I’m finding harder and harder to understand.’

‘You speak treason, Lord Tyrion,’ Daenerys stiffly proclaimed.

‘And _you’re_ blind as a mole; if somewhat better-looking,’ Tyrion snorted; unable to believe that she could be this stupid, ‘has it _never_ occurred to you how your dragons escaped the Red Keep? How they were able to bring you to Dragonstone immediately and prevent you from bleeding unceremoniously to death in a ditch somewhere? _She_ released them. The idea of their falling into Aegon’s hands was so intolerable to her that she ran _all the way down to the dragon pit_ , in the middle of a _massacre_ , to ensure that they escaped; all before coming to look for me, _or_ Jaime.’

Daenerys’ eyes erupted in a blaze of fire and blood; anger lining her face and curling her lip in a way that reminded Tyrion too much of Cersei for comfort as she demanded:

‘ _Arya_ is the one responsible for –?’

‘Your _dragons_ are the ones ‘responsible for,’ Dany!’ Tyrion interrupted, exasperated, ‘unless you intend to claim that the blood of the First Men can command the blood of Old Valyria, in which case you’re royally fucked –’

‘I claim nothing of the sort, _my lord Hand_!’ Daenerys spat.

‘– and as if that isn’t proof enough of the girl’s frankly-irrational loyalty,’ Tyrion raged; her use of his title infuriating him; ‘there was also a sweet little episode on our way to Dragonstone, when we ran into dear old Drogon making a spectacle of himself. She threw a bloody _knife_ at him – and almost got herself incinerated, I might add – rather than run the risk of leaving him where the black cloaks could find him. She –’

Tyrion’s words died on his tongue as Daenerys turned so shockingly pale that he almost seized hold of her and called for help. She tried to speak, and failed; her voice rasping and falling into nothingness, and he could feel his fingers twitching as he fought the instinct to take her hand, and kiss it, and tell her that everything would be alright.

‘The dagger hit his lower neck, _my queen_ ,’ Tyrion cruelly continued; ashamed of the concern that he felt and determined not to let her see it, ‘it’s probably fallen out already.’

‘ _Where is he?_ ’ Daenerys hissed; her violet eyes brimming over with tears and her strength seeming to crash and burn.

‘We haven’t seen him since,’ Tyrion shrugged; looking nonchalantly up at her, _don’t cry, please don’t cry, please, please, please, I can’t bear it when you cry_ , ‘but as I’ve said, and as you know, it’s highly unlikely that such a wound would kill him, or even seriously injure him. His skin is too thick.’

Daenerys looked at him for a long moment; naked in her vulnerability; naked, beautiful; before straightening up and donning the mask of monarchy once more; daggers chasing the tears from her eyes and forging them into her steel.

‘The thickness of Drogon’s _skin_ is scant comfort to a Mother who has lost one of her children,’ Daenerys snarled; her tone giving every indication that she was about to order the removal of Arya’s head, ‘ _as_ is Arya’s betrayal of her vows and incessant dishonouring of herself in –’

‘You may say what you wish about Arya’s ‘betrayal of her vows and incessant dishonouring of herself,’ Your Grace,’ Tyrion said, ‘I’ll _agree_ with you when you can name me a single person who would have taken similar, absurd risks to protect her queen. _Or_ her queen’s _children_.’

Tyrion began to tremble as Daenerys’ mask broke down again. The tears came, and the queen did not fight them; staring out to sea, and sobbing, and letting them fall.

He forced himself to watch her, and to remain silent; knowing that he would never call her ‘Dany’ again; knowing that it was fucking over between them, and that he’d better get used to the sight of her crying if he wanted to survive.

_She’ll be doing a lot more of it in the future; whether she wins or not._


	25. Chapter 25

Jaime stared up at the ceiling and valiantly fought the urge to simply roll off his bunk and throw up all over the floor. He hadn’t been on a ship since the Siege of Pyke twenty fucking years ago, and as he turned over on the narrow cot and vainly tried to use a pillow embroidered with the burning tree of House Marbrand to smother himself to sleep, he determined that this would be the last bloody time that he _ever_ set foot off solid ground again.

Jaime had found Addam Marbrand on the beach at Dragonstone, chatting up a buxom young lady with full breasts and silver hair, and paying absolutely no attention to the rowboat full of soldiers that were waiting on his pleasure.

‘Can I hold your sword, m’lord?’ the young lady had been proposing; batting her eyelashes, ‘it looks _ever_ so long.’

‘Where were you when I needed a wife?’ Addam had purred in reply; his deep voice dissolving into a strangled yell as Jaime clapped him hard on the shoulder and pulled him around to face him.

‘Ser Addam!’ Jaime had sweepingly greeted, ‘fancy meeting you here!’

‘ _My lord!_ ’ Addam had acknowledged; his face assuming all the guilty mortification of a child caught in the act, ‘I had not –’

‘House Lannister has not yet declared for either Targaryen pretender, Ser,’ Jaime had gravely interrupted; drawing himself up to his full height and imperiously folding his arms as the maiden gathered her skirts and fled, ‘would you kindly explain to me what you and your men are _doing_ here without the expressed permission of your liege lord?’

‘My lord,’ Addam had hastily responded with a look of deep horror, ‘I assure you –’

‘Is House Marbrand entertaining delusions of independence?’ Jaime had grimly pressed on, ‘do I need to send a singer to your hall to serenade you with a certain song?’

‘My lord, this is _unjust,_ ’ Addam had blurted; regaining some of his habitual vigour, ‘I have served House Lannister unfailingly since I was a boy; my loyalty to you and to your late lord father is absolute –’

‘Is that _so_?’ Jaime had interjected, ‘and yet here you are, breaking the policy of neutrality that I have imposed on my bannermen and chatting up dragonseed while you do it. What am I to make of that?’

Jaime watched with no small pleasure as words failed, then deserted, his childhood friend; Addam’s cheeks turning redder than his hair while Jaime frowned deeply at him; relished the fact that he was still able to frighten the life out of his bannermen when it suited him; then burst out laughing; hugging his sides as Addam’s expression went from respectfully-terrified to exasperated in less than a second.

‘Fuck you, Jaime!’ Addam had exclaimed.

‘Fuck _me_?’ Jaime had replied; his head jerking in the direction of a nearby copse of trees, where the silver-haired maiden still lingered in plain sight, ‘I find that very hard to believe after what I’ve just seen. _You_ used to set a much better example to your troops.’

‘And _you_ used to be much less of a bore, _my lord_ ,’ Addam had snorted.

Jaime had given Addam a shove, and had duly received one in return, when his gaze had fallen once again on the dozen disgruntled soldiers in the rowboat, and on the ships flying Westerlands colours further out in the bay.

‘How in seven hells did you lot get here so quickly?’ Jaime had asked.

‘ _We_ set out first, with only the frigates,’ Addam had said, ‘the rest are still on their way.’

‘The _rest_?’ Jaime had repeated in disbelief, ‘how many ships are still coming?’

‘We’d all given you up for dead after your accursed wedding; what else were we to do?’ Addam had indignantly responded, ‘stay in the Westerlands like a lot of cowardly little boys and let the murder of our liege lord go unpunished? What do you think? That your men don’t love you?’

‘Are there even enough men _alive_ in the Westerlands to man these ships?’ Jaime had hastily enquired; ignoring the uncharacteristic surge of affection welling up in his chest.

Addam had responded with a sullen shrug that reminded Jaime of Arya, though the two were nothing alike; and a somewhat awkward silence had followed, during which the two men had stared at each other’s boots and pretended to shiver in the cold.

‘The queen has forbidden me to come to King’s Landing and fight,’ Jaime had said; once the silence had become intolerable.

‘I… heard about that,’ Addam had cautiously ventured, ‘though perhaps Her Grace is in the right, your hand does not –’

Jaime had shot him a wrathful glare, and Addam’s hands had shot rapidly into the air as though Jaime were aiming a crossbow at him.

‘So I take it you’ll be wanting my cabin, then?’ Addam had asked.

‘Smart boy,’ Jaime had congratulated.

‘Do I want to know _why_ you’re so eager to get yourself killed?’ Addam had pressed.

Jaime had shrugged at that.

‘Daenerys has sent a friend of mine to get _her_ self killed,’ he had replied, ‘and I’d rather that didn’t happen.’

‘Arya Stark?’ Addam had gracelessly enquired.

‘Maybe,’ Jaime had shrugged.

‘Dirty old man.’

‘Speak for yourself.’

 

* * *

 

The ship gave a particularly unpleasant roll on the waves, and Jaime flung the pillow away from him and squeezed his eyes shut. Arya arose from the darkness, as she had been the last time that he had seen her; grey and lovely in the early morning light while she dressed and buckled on her sword belt.

‘You’re not going to change your mind,’ Jaime had said, still abed, ‘are you?’

‘I don’t have the strength to fight with you now,’ Arya had curtly replied; pulling her boots on, ‘you know why I must do this. You know that it needs to be done.’

‘Agreeing with it doesn’t mean I have to like it,’ Jaime had persisted; sitting up, ‘just…will you at least _consider_ what I said about Aegon? Please?’

Arya had sighed deeply to herself, and had stood for some time with her back to him; before turning suddenly around, stomping unceremoniously over to the bed, plonking herself down next to him and embracing him tightly.

Jaime had felt her heart beating red and violent through her clothes.

‘Please don’t die,’ Arya had whispered; her head nestling in the crook of his shoulder; her arms tight around his back; ‘if your hand…if it becomes too painful, or too much when you’re fighting…promise me you’ll stop. You have to promise me.’

‘You’re not even going to forbid me to go?’ Jaime had joked in reply; ‘you _wound_ me, Lady Stark.’

‘ _Promise me_ , Jaime,’ Arya had growled; her fingers digging into his back.

Jaime had kissed her shoulder, and held her closer to him.

‘I give you my solemn vow,’ he said.

They both knew he was lying.


	26. Chapter 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be aware that this chapter contains scenes of rape. If you are uncomfortable with this, then please do not read it.

Arya crept quiet as a shadow through Maegor’s Holdfast; on the rafters, above the corridors, beneath the ceiling. The wood breathed beneath her feet; tiny cracks opening up, closing again and groaning silently as she moved on and on; her legs seeming to move for her; her limbs tied to strings held by an all-powerful master puppeteer.

Her Facelessness was still there. Bone deep. Unreachable. Eternal.

And yet it wasn’t there. Bone deep. Unreachable. Eternal.

Every sound distracted her; worried her; slowed her down. Every whisper of night air made her pause in her tracks and fret and hear, when before she would have listened, evaluated, and moved on; all without pausing; all without blinking; as though the sound the world made was subject to her will and not contrariwise.

She wanted to be free of it; to take Jaime’s hand and run and keep running; and her masters would never let her. She knew that. If she withdrew from the guild, she would be killed. If her master in King’s Landing saw what she had become, she would be killed. If she avoided his house, she would be killed. And if she ran…

She jumped as two black cloaks passed beneath her; complaining loudly about double shifts and half pay. They were the only guards that Arya had seen all night, and the very thought made her shiver.

 _If a lovely girl sees an apparently too-good-to-be-true thing, then that thing is_ _just so_ , Jaqen had once told her, _luck is for soldiers, and for mummers, and for men at the end of all things. Luck is the enemy of Death, and we_ are _Death, sweet child._

And the silence within the Keep and the silence outside it were like the voices of Death; cloaking Daenerys’ ships, and troops, and what they came to do, in darkness. And screams were resounding clearly into the night and making Death’s voice fade away, and for a moment, Arya thought that the battle had started. That was the way all battles began, after all. The silence. Then the screaming.

But the screams were all wrong. They were too close. They echoed beneath her in the corridor and above her in the ceiling, and Arya ceased walking on the rafters and began to run; her boots leaving no footprints in the dust; her defences slamming up, and her senses seizing sound and smell from the air as she rounded a corner, skipped lightly from one rafter to the next, and perceived four black cloaks standing somewhat obviously outside a single wooden door and listening to a man and a woman screaming. The man was screaming in ecstasy; the woman in pain, and fear.

Arya recognised Aegon’s voice immediately. She had heard it a thousand times during the Targaryen conquest, roaring out ‘Fire and Blood!’ as he charged into the van; a Valyrian steel sword that he presumptuously called Dark Sister clutched in his hand and glinting savagely as he held it above his head. But now, tonight, that same voice was raised in a hideous arousal that she had not even heard on the lips of soldiers sacking a city. He was screaming a name – hers – again and again, and smothering the cries of a female voice that Arya did not recognise, and that was screaming in its turn, and crying and pleading, ‘you’re hurting me… _you’re hurting me_ …please, Your Grace, you’re _hurting me!_ ’ And her words were dissolving into hopeless, agonising wails beneath the weight of savage growls, low laughs and the sound of flesh tearing as Arya stood above the guards with bile in her throat and watched them stare at the floor and do nothing. And her Facelessness was freezing her up and turning her to ice; the worst kind of ice; the kind that told her not to intervene; the kind that told her to wait; to be practical; that Aegon would be at his weakest when he had finished whatever he was doing to her… _I can’t_ … _I CAN’T_ …but the puppeteer was holding Arya’s limbs and pulling her back: he _had_ been from the moment that she had climbed into those fucking rafters and returned to where Facelessness belonged; to quietness; to silence, _I thought I was free; I THOUGHT I WAS FREE,_ and the woman was shrieking in pain and Aegon was shrieking in ecstasy, ‘you’re hurting me… _you’re hurting me_ ,’ he cruelly echoed, and Arya’s blood was shrieking in her veins, _I can’t listen to this,_ and she was digging a handful of Valyrian steel triangles out of her shoulder belt and feeling the edges as they cut her fingers, _I CAN’T_ , and the guards were slumping to the floor beneath the weight of the steel, and Arya was dropping to the floor beneath the weight of the screaming, and she was charging into the room and catching only a glimpse of the tangle of naked limbs on a bed stained with blood before she had thrown herself forward, seized Aegon by the hair and torn him off the ravaged body of a girl; tall, boyish and brunette.

_Like me._

The world turned red as blood, then red as the sandstone floor as Aegon dealt her a terrific blow that seemed to strike through her head like a morning star through a ripe melon. Its spikes pierced her lungs and sent blood spilling upwards into her throat as Aegon’s naked weight plunged down onto hers. He smiled at her with blood-stained lips and grunted at her with blood-stained teeth as her right fist barrelled into his face and the nails of her left hand scratched wolf-claw wounds into his cheek; and her hands were closing around her daggers, then weakening, then slipping off them entirely as Aegon’s fingers fastened around her throat, and squeezed.

Arya felt her throat crack. Her limbs began to twitch and shudder like the limbs of a headless corpse. Her vision trembled, and darkened; in inches; in objects; until only Aegon’s hands were left; the feeling of his hands around her throat; squeezing; and she realised, as the darkness claimed her, that Jaime had been right all along.

 _When he sees you, and he_ will _see you; he’ll see it as confirmation of all his suspicions. He’ll be reminded of the thousand-and-one times that you’ve rejected his royal advances. And when those two things come together in his head, the seven gods together will not be able to do a thing to save you._

 

* * *

 

 

She was tied to a chair with a curtain rope. She would have laughed aloud had she had the breath for it.

_Tied to a chair? Really?_

Aegon sat naked before her on the edge of the bed; his cheek bleeding where her nails had scratched him, and his cock standing erect in its mouse nest of silver hair. He paid no attention to the sounds of battle, or to the absence of the girl that he had been torturing, and cradled Arya’s weapons in his hands as though they were made of glass; idly running his fingers over the steel studs of her sword belt. When he realised that she was awake, he looked slowly up at her; his eyes dark with lust as his fingers tapped relentlessly at the tip of one of her daggers.

‘Your eyes have changed,’ Aegon said softly, ‘there is more life in them; more…’

‘Did you rhapsodise about my sister’s eyes before you killed her?’ Arya spat.

Aegon tossed her sword and daggers onto the bed and leaned slowly towards her: close to her, too close. His bloodied fingers reached out and caressed the line of her jaw, and a small, sensual gap opened wantonly up between his lips as he breathed in her scent.

She wanted to struggle and fight and scream until blood stained her mouth.

_If I do that, he will never stop._

‘Only a short time ago,’ Aegon murmured; his hair falling into his eyes as he stroked her face; ‘only weeks ago, in fact…I would never have done anything to hurt my sweet Sansa… I would never have done anything to hurt _you…_ despite your manifold… _manifold_ cruelties.’

Arya snorted, admired his imagination, and remained silent.

‘Even now,’ Aegon whispered; tracing a finger down her throat and relishing the way it made her shudder; ‘the very thought of blemishing your skin…or tearing it…or cutting it…even now, when I see that you have been awakened by a hand other than mine…the thought of hurting you is painful to me –’

‘I wish I could say the same,’ Arya snarled; dread boiling in her stomach.

‘–though my bitch of a wife _does_ surprise me by sending you to kill me in your present condition,’ Aegon continued; his fingers catching at a drop of pre-cum as it glistened on the tip of his cock, ‘does she _know_ that your Facelessness has been exhumed? Has she noticed its absence? Has she seen that it is now as non-existent as your virtue?’

‘My _virtue_ has been non-existent for the past three years, _Your Grace_ ,’ Arya growled; nausea stirring in her throat as Aegon lazily rolled his seed between his thumb and forefinger, ‘don’t think that I’m a maiden just because I haven’t fucked _you_.’

‘She _didn’t_ notice, did she?’ Aegon cooed; raising his moistened fingers to her mouth, _no, fuck, NO;_ seizing the back of her head when she tried to jerk away and spreading his stickiness into the gap between her lips while she struggled, and writhed, and gagged, ‘but then, Daenerys doesn’t know you like I do. She doesn’t know…’

Arya viciously spat his fucking _juices_ right back into his stupid face.

‘ _You don’t know a fucking thing about me, you dragon spawn scum,_ ’ she spat; grunting in pain as Aegon slammed his fist into her stomach, so hard that she doubled over in her chair and couldn’t pull herself up again. She coughed and rasped and gasped for breath that didn’t come; she spat at his feet because she couldn’t spit in his face; and Aegon was shoving her roughly upright, licking his own fingers like a hungry cat, and reassuming his examination of her body as though nothing had happened.

The tip of his tongue poked out between his teeth; reptilian as he traced a finger down her neck. She could still taste him on her lips and smell him on herself as his hands moved slowly down her chest to cup her breasts, and she wanted to impale this insolent pup on the tip of her sword and roast his balls on a fucking brazier; but _if I fight, it’ll only arouse him more_ , she thought; and she swallowed the horror, the violation, the wrong; and yanked tentatively at the rope that bound her hands together. It was tight…and fragile.

She tried grinding her wrists together.

The bonds loosened.

_He’s never tied someone up in his life, the fucking amateur._

‘You _feel_ nothing like your sister,’ Aegon was murmuring; his hands ghosting over her stomach and covering her cunt, _no, don’t touch me there, don’t you fucking touch me there,_ ‘all bones, and straight lines. All life. Every day, I miss her. I miss her voice. I miss her counsel. I miss the past. The past when she was wise… and you were beautiful. As mysterious as the mists that rise from the sea below Dragonstone.’

Arya tensed up as his fingers slipped inside her smallclothes, _don’t think about it, don’t think, loosen your bonds, loosen them, break free –_

‘I would have cut out my heart,’ Aegon was continuing, ‘and offered it to every god that existed in exchange for a mere glance inside yours. You were my favourite enigma. The ghost that haunted my life and the ghost that haunted my dreams. Until you developed a taste for sucking Lannister cock, and proved to be as great a fool as every other woman that I have ever met.’

‘I have no taste for sucking Lannister cock,’ Arya loudly declared; sounding braver than she felt, _loosen your bonds, loosen them, break free,_ ‘I have always despised cock-sucking, in point of fact. A man’s cock belongs in my cunt, not in my mouth.’

‘And Ser Jaime tolerates this… strange distaste, does he?’ Aegon purred; his fingers slipping into her cunt and pinching her nub; his mouth smiling as she failed to keep herself from squirming.

‘He doesn’t mind it,’ Arya replied, _just loosen…just work…break free…_ ‘not when I’ve tasted every other part of him that exists.’

Quick as a viper, Aegon pulled his hand out of her smallclothes and struck her so hard across the mouth that the blood boiling up into the space between her lips almost made her choke.

‘Mysterious enough for you, Your Grace?’ Arya rasped; spitting blood out of her mouth.

‘Does House Stark breed nothing but _whores_?’ Aegon was screaming; half-anger; half-despair; his face contorting like a hell mouth beneath the mad, staring blackness of his eyes as he hit her again, and again, and turned her mind to half-light as he seized a candle from the table and set it alight; ‘are you all so fucking _spoiled_ and _tainted_ that I must burn you all to _ashes_ to cleanse this country of _filth_? Or should I simply set your _cunts_ on fire?’

His hands trembled with excitement as he drew fiery patterns in the air between her legs and held the candle so close to her cunt that she could feel the heat, _loosen your bonds, loosen them, break free, don’t listen to him, don’t listen,_ ‘gods, I’ve been a fucking _fool_!’ Aegon was bellowing, ‘I might have done as much to your sister instead of killing her, and at least there would have been a hole left for me to _fuck!_ ’

He seized hold of her hair once more and yanked her face up to his; and his other hand brushed her inner thigh as it held the candle in place like a dagger; ‘shall I set _your_ cunt on fire, Kingslayer’s whore? Will you scream for me, if I do? Will you scream for me like you scream for your Kingslaying master when he sticks his cock in you and makes you peak?’

The laughter tore from Arya’s throat before she could stop herself.

‘You really have no fucking idea, do you?’ she snarled; unable to keep a smile from her lips; ‘I’d feel sorry for you if I had it in me to commit more than one major act of forgiveness in my life. But you really think I _scream_ for him? You like to think that, don’t you? You like to imagine me on my back; screaming and begging like a whore? Well I’m sorry to disappoint Your Grace…but I don’t do any of that. When I’m fucking Jaime, I don’t _scream_ when I come. I _SOB_. I sob like the world’s about to end; like I’m about to crash apart and disintegrate and DIE, because being any _closer_ would kill both me and him. That’s what happens _when you have a real man inside you, Your Grace_ ; not some petulant little boy with a tiny brain and an even tinier cock.’

Her words had the desired effect.

Aegon moved; screamed; writhed. She could feel his hand closing around her laces to tear the front of her breeches, and his other hand clutching the candle to press it against her skin. And she yanked once again at the rope that bound her hands, and felt it coming apart.

Her bonds fell into her hands like freedom. The wolf blood in her veins seared and burned; and she was spitting blood into Aegon’s eyes; leaping to her feet; seizing hold of the chair she had been tied to; and smashing it hard into his face.

The chair shattered against Aegon’s body in a ruin of splintered wood and nails and rope. He shrieked in pain and laughed in pain as a hailstorm of splinters cut his skin; as nails drove into his cheeks, and chest, and shoulders; and as Arya swung what remained of the chair against the back of his neck and watched him drop, like a weight, onto the bed.

She leapt onto him like a wraith and pinned his knees down with her heels; discarding the rope that had bound her hands and seizing hold of her sword belt that Aegon had thrown aside. She drew one of her daggers, hesitated for a moment, and plunged the blade straight through Aegon’s thigh into the mattress beneath him.

The dagger pierced Aegon’s skin like a pin cushion and brought his mind roaring back into consciousness like a fit of madness. He shrieked and flared and raged like a firestorm; lunging for her and lunging for the blade and carving-up his own leg in a gruesome dance between the two desires as Arya removed a pillow from behind his head and hopped off the bed.

‘Careful, Your Grace,’ she counselled; turning the pillow over in her hands; ‘I’ve scratched your cheek with my nails and stuck a dagger in your thigh. Who knows what I’ll do next if I’m provoked?’

Aegon was screaming for help and spilling more and more of his own blood; ‘have you got any wine?’ Arya asked; trying to sound nonchalant; ‘I’m absolutely parched,’; the corridor outside was roaring suddenly and thunderingly with the sound of troops approaching; and Arya had only just _located_ the wine and dropped the pillow on top of Aegon’s cock (she was tired of looking at it) when the door burst loudly open to admit Loras and twenty knights sworn to House Tyrell: the people she had been told to expect at the _end_ of the battle.

‘Is it over already?’ Arya asked, spitting blood out of her mouth and beginning to feel light-headed as Loras approached her, ‘that must be the shortest battle in living memory.’

‘The pretender king had more troops at his command that we had anticipated,’ Loras replied; watching his men as they surrounded Aegon, ‘it made the battle last about ten minutes longer than expected. Tarly, take your hands OFF that thrice-damned dagger; do you want him to die?!’

‘Not that I give a fuck, but you should probably get a maester,’ Arya cavalierly suggested; ashamed of the sudden weakness in her knees, ‘otherwise Her Grace won’t get her trial.’

‘Are you alright?’ Loras asked; staring at her, ‘you look bloody awful.’

‘I’m fine,’ Arya told him.

She only just had time to wonder why she lied before she was dashing rapidly over to the wash stand and retching like a poisoned man.

Revulsion was spreading like a plague from her mouth to her entire being; nausea was overwhelming her at the memory, and the touch, and the _taste_ ; Loras was standing helplessly at her back and awkwardly rubbing her shoulder; and she was retching without vomiting, and weeping at how the ugliness wouldn’t come out; at how it stayed with her; _in_ her. Tremours violated her body as she washed out her mouth with the contents of a bottle that might have been soap, or perfume, or even disinfectant; and she spat, and gargled, and retched still further as she listened to Loras sending for a maester and demanding to know what Aegon had done to her; and her stomach was churning and her mind reeling and her cunt still smarting from the touch, _his_ touch, that… _it’s alright, it’s over now, it’s over, don’t cry, DON’T CRY_.

She forced herself to straighten up, and to turn around composedly. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve and ran her fingers distractedly through her hair, and looked suddenly at Loras, who was standing hesitantly in front of her and trying and failing to say something; his white plate soaked in blood and half an arrow still sticking out of his left arm.

He wasn’t saying anything.

‘What?’ Arya snapped.

Loras did not reply, and continued to stare at her as though she were a jar of wildfire.

‘ _What_?’ Arya insisted.

She raised a hand to clout him on the head, as she always did when she was angry with him. Then she noticed his face: twisted, despairing, wiped blank…the same look that it had borne on the beach…on the edge of the water… just before he had told her about Sansa.

‘What?’ Arya murmured; so softly that she could hardly hear herself.

‘Ser Jaime…’ Loras stammered, ‘he…he’s…’

‘But…Jaime’s not… here,’ Arya told him; her voice sounding dense and stupid in her own ears; her mind; her chest; – ‘he’s in Dragonstone; the queen left him – what happened?’

‘He tracked down a few Lannister bannermen who had declared for Daenerys without his consent,’ Loras rushed on, ‘and pulled rank to gain passage to King’s –’

‘ _What’s happened to him?_ ’ Arya demanded.

Loras’ eyes were huge and golden; the colour of a death mask.

‘He…took a pike to the stomach during the storming of the Mud Gate,’ he said; gently enough to make her scream; ‘they say he lost his grip on his sword –’

‘Where is he?’

‘Arya, please listen –’

‘ _Where is he?_ ’

 

* * *

 

The Queen’s ballroom already stank of blood and death when she shoved the door open and walked into bedlam. There were cots set out in rows, and mattresses laid out on the floor, and Targaryen men and Blackfyre men slipping in blood and drowning in blood and howling without limbs and howling with steel limbs that were lodged in their guts and their heads; and maesters, and maesters’ boys rushing about with bandages and supplies and looking up in fascination at the gold filigree ceiling like they couldn’t help themselves; and screams screams screams as Arya pushed her way through the chaos with tears stinging her eyes like the weak little idiot that she was; _the fool, the bloody fool, he promised me he would stop if he couldn’t carry on, he promised me, he_ promised _, where is he? Where is he?_

She asked the question of a thousand faces; all of which seemed to dissolve and disappear and flee without answering; and every moment of not knowing was a descent: a descent out of herself, and a descent into herself; herself with him no longer there.

She found Jaime unconscious on a cot at the far end of the hall. His face was a ghastly, blood-stained shadow of himself; the silver of his beard half-alive beneath the red. He was bare from the waist up, and his scars were almost invisible beneath the blood that covered them; his scars that she had kissed, his scars that were also her scars. Piles and piles of bloodied rags and strips held a poultice in place above his stomach, _they’re trying to stop the bleeding, they’ve gone for more bandages_ ; and she could see the breath limping weakly in his lungs and pushing more blood out of him as she knelt beside him and peeled the poultice away. Blood spurted onto her hand, fresh and red from his insides that were now his outsides, and she pressed the poultice down again and took his hand with her other hand; his hand that was burnt by dragonfire, and cold as black ice; and her fingertips were gliding across his forehead and across his hair, as they had done a thousand times before; and all of him was cold, and half-dead.

An exhausted-looking maester arrived with fresh dressings and bloodied sleeves; peeling the poultice away and spilling more blood as he applied a fresh one.

‘Will he live?’ Arya asked; making the maester start, and glare.

‘Who in seven hells are you?’ he snapped, ‘this is the Lord of Casterly Rock, you can’t just –’

 _Who am I,_ Arya thought ironically; looking down at Jaime, dying, while the maester ranted on and on about nothing.

 _Nothing is what I have if he dies_ , she thought, _No one is what I will be without him. Who am I now. Right now._

‘I’m Arya,’ she croaked, ‘of the House Stark.’

Jaime stirred slightly, his eyelashes fluttering as though fighting to wake up. But his fingers remained cold as she clutched them tightly in hers, and his face remained cold as she touched his cheek, and when she looked up at the maester again, his demeanour had changed, to something that she hated more than disdain.

‘You should –’ the maester stammered; his earlier insolence forgotten as his eyes grew dark with pity; ‘I believe you should prepare yourself before –’

‘I don’t need to prepare myself; just _tell me!_ ’ Arya shouted; rather wanting to snap the man’s venerable neck and burst into tears once she’d done it.

The maester looked her in the eye, and told her what she knew already.

‘He will die tonight, my lady.’


	27. Chapter 27

He couldn’t move or speak, but he could hear Arya’s voice. The sound of her name had cut through the ice of his unconsciousness as mercilessly as the steel that had sliced through his flesh. His heart was pumping magma instead of blood: magma that boiled out of the wound in his stomach and slowly turned his insides to charred meat and ashes. But he clung to the pain, and he clung to her voice; and he wished that he could hold her fingers tightly and let her know that he could hear her.

She was protesting every word the maester said with a few short words that she repeated the-gods-only-knew how many times: ‘but he’s strong. _No one understands how strong he is_.’ Once, that might have been true. But. The cold fever was changing to thrashing, shivering heat; he could feel the magma as it pulsed scalding, blistering, _atrocious_ fucking pain to every part of his body; and half of him wanted to pass out again and let it end, and half of him wanted to stay here in the pain and in the agony; and listen to Arya speak; and fight for life until he had no blood left.

‘But he’s _strong_ ,’ Arya was yet again insisting, ‘ _No one understands how strong he is_.’

 _I’m not strong, love,_ Jaime thought, wishing that he could take her in his arms and explain; _I’m dying._

In his mind he was drifting in a sea of blood and sinking further and further beneath the surface. The deeper he sank, the less the pain became. And the less the pain became, the softer her voice sounded.

He tried to fight the beauty of the painlessness. He couldn’t.          

He tried to fight the beauty of her voice. He couldn’t.

And Arya was still speaking, and the maester wasn’t listening to her; dismissively brushing aside every word she said with talk of covering him in _blankets_ , and ‘ _easing his passing_ ,’ and calling a septon to ‘ _speak the words_.’

 _I don’t need any fucking blankets, I don’t want my passing eased, and I_ certainly _don’t want a bloody septon_ , Jaime thought, _if I’m to die, just let me die and be_ done _with it – gods above, what a fuss!_

Arya was expressing similar sentiments, and telling the maester that a septon would only have annoyed him had he been conscious enough to listen to one; the maester was accusing her of sacrilege and advising her to keep her mystery religions to herself, and Jaime sorely wished that the old fool would just drop dead and leave him in peace with Arya’s voice and Arya’s everything. For the sea of blood was growing warmer and calmer; the pain was numbing, further and further, and he knew, somehow, that when it disappeared, he would be in a place where he could never hear her again.

The septon came anyway, and wasted time with his petty rituals, and Jaime could feel the tips of Arya’s fingers brushing his wrist, and her heart beating faster and faster as the septon spoke a lot of words that he didn’t care to hear, and for a while, he remembered what her heartbeat had felt like when it had thundered hard through his own veins; tasting sweet and hot on his lips. But the septon was still at it; stealing away their time like a Dothraki left alone in a jewellery shop; ‘judge our good Lord Jaime justly,’ the septon said; blessing him in the Light of the Seven; and Jaime would have snorted had the very thought not been painful enough to make him scream. If the gods did indeed exist, and for some extraordinary reason took it into their heads to ‘judge our good Lord Jaime justly’, it’d be the deepest of the seven hells for him; no question.

 _An eternity spent with Father and Cersei_ , he thought, _the gods had better not bloody well exist._

The septon _finally_ went away; leaving him with Arya’s fingers clutched between his; and ‘not today,’ he heard her whisper; her voice like broken glass; ‘not today; not today; not today,’ and he recognised her scent; a scent of steel that was warm, like earth; and the pain was truly dying now, but was somehow worse than ever; worse than his hand; worse than Brienne; worse than… anything.

He didn’t know why he lingered when it hurt so fucking much.

He lingered for himself.

He lingered for her.

Arya’s breath was warm on his face, and he felt her lips at his ear; brushing softly against his earlobe and making him shiver.

‘If it’s not…too much to ask…’ he heard her whisper, ‘um…could you please just…not die?...If there comes a time when letting go just seems…uh…easier, or…cleaner, or…when leaving wherever you are becomes too hard, just…don’t…don’t die. Please… I…um…I love you. A lot. And I would…be really… grateful…if you didn’t die. Uh…that’s…that’s all. Please listen. Please.’

 _I should have married you_ , he thought, and he saw with eyes that were not his own; saw Arya looking down at him; her grey eyes awash with tears, and her face bruised and swollen; as though she’d been struck again and again by the naked fist of a madman.

_I will…kill…him…_

He couldn’t feel her fingers anymore. His body hit the seabed, and the sand had the texture of scarred flesh. Arya was biting on her teeth and trying to stop the sobs from coming; _I never told her how beautiful she is; never told her.._. he thought. And just behind her, at a place that he was sure she could not see, stood a solitary figure in black; watching her; watching him.


	28. Chapter 28

She felt a crushing pain to the back of her head, and the smell of her own blood in her nostrils, and whoever had hit her didn’t move her, or touch her, but whispered in her ear as she lost consciousness, ‘this is your first ultimatum, Servant. Choose wisely.’

The words chased her across her dreams, from Braavos to Westeros and back again. She heard them as a young girl in the common room of an inn; deciding to repay a debt as she watched Jaime lie to Cersei’s face. She heard them in the darkness of the temple and in Jaqen’s dead, hazel eyes that had once been full of light. She heard them in the stones of siege after siege as she killed and maimed; across a thousand evenings spent watching Tyrion drinking; through every second that she had ever felt Jaime prising her fingers one by one from the Faceless God’s embrace: ‘This is your first ultimatum, Servant,’ the words said, ‘choose wisely.’

‘Arya,’ a nearby, familiar voice murmured; loudly enough to make the tiniest part of herself murmur back into consciousness, and her head was spinning like the vision of a drowning man, but lying against something soft, and her knees were resting hard on solid ground; so stiff that she could hardly feel them at all; and ‘Arya,’ she heard once again, and she was yanked out of sleep in brutal completeness as memory drove a stake right through her and didn’t let her die; forcing her to remember that she was kneeling on the floor next to Jaime’s cot with one of her bruised cheeks resting on the mattress; holding the warm hand of a corpse. The light beyond her eyelids suggested that daylight had come already; the noise and the stench that she was in exactly the same place that she had been before, and grief was pressing in on her and filling her lungs with corruption so filthy that she could hardly bear to breathe at all.

Somebody pulled her hand out of Jaime’s and began to play with her hair; a child by the feel of things; its fingers flicking clumsily at the top of her head in order to ensure maximum annoyance; and she opened her eyes to scream at the person to leave her in peace and to ask them what fucking right they had to decide when she should let him go.

Her eyes met Jaime’s, and he was staring at her; as though seeing her for the first time; his eyes green, and bright, and…and…

She stared and stared, as she had when Jaqen had died, and felt her breath stop in her chest; her eyes finding both life and death in him and not knowing which one she should cleave to. His fingers were brushing weakly at her hair that had fallen across her cheek, and he was saying her name again, ‘Arya,’ and looking at her as though she were everything; his silver hair plastered to his forehead in a humid mess of broken fever and his chest slowly rising and falling in what she imagined was some trick of the light, or…hopeful hallucination that her mind had cooked up to protect itself from the all-consuming awareness of his inexistence that was slowly eating her sanity alive.

No one could survive that kind of wound. Not even him.

But then there were the words that she had dreamed, and the blood clotting in her hair from the blow to the back of her head, and _he is dead, you stupid little fool_ , she thought, _and he isn’t coming back._

But Jaime, or the vision of Jaime, continued to watch her silently; looking at her cautiously, not asking what she was doing; _understanding_ what she was doing as she reached across his bed of blood to touch his lips; even though it didn’t make sense; even though her masters wouldn’t go to all the trouble of tracking her down mid-battle, only to leave her with nothing but a cracked skull; even though he couldn’t be alive…

When her fingers touched Jaime’s lips, she felt his breath on them, and his living eyes on her; like a hurricane; like life.

‘Jaime?’ she choked.

‘Arya,’ Jaime murmured in reply, ‘you’re beautiful.’

The breath that rushed back into her lungs was like a blow to the chest that nearly killed her. She felt herself choke, and fall, and cry out as her heart surged with blood and her world surged with it; with her voice seeking out his and being answered; with her fingers that stayed on his lips and his lips that kissed them; his hand encircling her wrist and holding onto it like iron; with his mouth that tasted of life as it opened beneath hers; as she asked the question without needing an answer ‘how can you be alive? How are you alive? How are you alive?’ and he answered, softly, his lips brushing hers, ‘none of the seven hells would take me.’

She pulled rapidly away from him and hit him in his smug Lannister face.

‘None of the seven hells would _take_ you?’ Arya screeched, clouting him again and relishing the yelp of surprise that escaped him as the blow made his hair stand on end,‘is that your idea of a joke?’

‘ _Calm down, girl_!’ Jaime shouted; seizing hold of one of her wrists while its counterpart punched every part of him that she could reach; stomach wound be damned.

‘Why didn’t you just _do_ what you’d promised and stopped fighting when you couldn’t fight anymore?’ Arya yelled; still struggling wildly as Jaime somehow managed to get his hand on both her wrists at once, ‘you promised me; you PROMISED me!!’

‘Have you ever actually _seen_ a battle, Lady Stark?’ Jaime scoffed, ‘sometimes you _can’t_ just pull out whenever you feel like it!’

‘You _can_ when you’ve made a _promise_!’ Arya yelled.

‘What happened to your face?’ Jaime demanded.

‘Aegon happened to my face!’ Arya shouted.

Jaime stared at her, then shrugged unconcernedly.

‘Well, I hate to say ‘I told you so – ’’

‘Shut up!’

‘But I told you so!’

‘I’m thrilled my bruises amuse you!’

‘All they do is make me want to kill the son of a bitch!’

‘How in seven hells are you alive enough to kill him, anyway; have the gods suddenly acquired a sense of humour?’

Arya yanked her hands out of his and set to tearing off his bandages; ignoring his grunts of discomfort and protest as she tossed the blood-soaked poultice aside and pulled the cloth that covered the hole in his stomach away.

Nothing remained of the wound itself save a scar, and an iron coin nestled atop it.

A pause. Silence. Blankness. Denial.

_This is your first ultimatum, Servant. Choose wisely._

Understanding. The world turning dark again. Jaime speaking to her. Her not hearing him.

It was magic. It had to be, though she knew nothing of the existence of spells powerful enough to heal such a wound. The Faceless Men _took_ life; they did not give it. But if a healing as extraordinary as this _was_ possible, and a summons left for her at the same time… she didn’t need to be Faceless to work out what that meant.

Her masters had much more to gain from Jaime’s continued existence than from his death. They would not consider justice to be done to them if they killed her when she already wanted to die. They would merely be doing her a favour, then, and traitors were not indulged at the House of Black and White.

 _Come to Braavos to face judgment, and he lives_ , was their message to her, _run, and we will find him again, and do far worse than undo what has been done._

_This is your first ultimatum, Servant. Choose wisely._

Jaime was staring hard at her; watching each movement and flicker of her eyes as though she were an opponent that he faced in battle: an opponent from whom he would never receive the truth, and that he could only kill – or save – by guessing what they refused to say.

‘What does it mean?’Jaime asked.

She immediately tried to control her expression; to turn herself blank as she looked at him, and hurt.

Alive. Hers. Alive.

‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ she said, and slipped the coin into her pocket.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please be aware that next week is the final chapter of this particular journey with our two darlings. This one shall endeavour to make it awesome.


	29. Chapter 29

When Tyrion refused, for the final time, to visit his brother, Arya opened her mouth and considered telling him where she was going. It felt important, somehow, to tell someone, just in case, by some miracle, they let her live. So she opened her mouth to speak, and no words came out, and when Tyrion asked her what the matter was, she stomped out of his rooms, and slammed the door behind her; cursing her own stupid hope.

After that, she only stayed long enough for night to fall, and to board a ship to Braavos; her hood hiding her features, and the weight of her bones only slightly assuaged by the ringing of Aegon’s screams in her ears. Since his capture, he had screamed non-stop, and so loudly that he could be heard in every corner of the Red Keep; gripped, apparently, by fits of inhuman pain that seemed to ripple across his entire body and sink deep into his very bones. The queen had assigned a small army of maesters to work tirelessly at discovering the cause of his discomfort, but none of them had yet been able to determine even the source of the pain; the application of pressure to his wounded thigh making no difference to the intensity either of his keening, or of his suffering.

Just thinking about it made Arya smile. Having one’s cheek scratched by a person who had painted her nails with Manticore venom was a painful occurrence indeed.

She stood up on deck in the darkness; watching King’s Landing by night with a half-empty bottle of wine in her hand. Apart from the colossal ruins of the Red Keep, the desolation that she had caused by releasing the dragons was almost invisible. There were candles burning in thousands of windows, and snatches of song and raucous drunkenness in the streets as the Targaryen armies celebrated their victory.

_Would I be there with them, had my masters not called me to Braavos to die?_

Probably. She’d be there with both Jaime and Tyrion, in some squalid little tavern filled with Lannister soldiers, drinking herself into a stupor, trying to get the two brothers to talk and trying to forget that her entire pack was gone. Her sister that she had not known, murdered. The nephew that she had never met, murdered. The only pack that she had left was Jaime, and now he was gone too.

 _You could have told_ _him_ , the wicked voice in her head told her, _you could have told him everything and asked him to run away with you, somewhere…_

But there was nowhere to run to where her masters would not find them, and besides, how could she ask him to give up his freedom; to spend the rest of his life in hiding, because of her?

True, she _could_ have given him the chance to decide for himself, but even though she was no narcissist, she knew what his answer would have been:

_‘Fuck it. Let’s run.’_

No good.

She drank deeply from the bottle of wine and felt momentary relief as the warmth surged within her, and it grew colder on deck, and darker, until her sight was shaped only by stars, and as she listened to the sound of the waves lapping quietly against the sides of the ship, she remembered arriving in King’s Landing five; six weeks ago; knowing nothing; not even herself.

_If I hadn’t disembarked on that day, I wouldn’t be going to my death right now._

_I don’t care. At least I know something now._

Even though she didn’t much want to die. Even though she’d only just learned how to live. Even though there was an abyss in her that grew wider and wider with every inch that the ship moved away from King’s Landing, and with every inch that she moved away from Jaime. Tears welled up in her eyes at the memory of his breath on her fingers; the breath that had told her he lived, and for a moment, as she dreamed, the ache of being away from him grew less, then less, until she could almost swear that his fingers were brushing the back of her neck and gently curling themselves into her hair.

Arya spun around like a slingshot; her hand moving instinctively to her sword, and Jaime was standing in front of her like a dream; like a nightmare; alive, hers, alive: touching her; staring at her; his expression a mix of brutal condemnation and the strange, sweet recognition that she saw in him each time he looked at her; his eyes soft and eternal.

Disbelief flooded her. Then despair.

‘What – what are you – what –’

‘Tyrion told me.’

‘I didn’t say anything to Tyrion!’

‘That’s why he came to see me. It’s not like you to keep your mouth shut.’

A brief euphoria shot through her, and was swiftly followed by guilt as she realised that she was glad to see him; that disbelief, anger and fear for him were the only things preventing her from seizing him by the front of his doublet and kissing him until she forgot what it felt like to breathe.

‘How did you find me?’ Arya asked; despairing.

‘My stomach miraculously healed itself and somehow spat out an iron coin that turned you the colour of snow,’ Jaime candidly replied, ‘after which you disappeared for an entire fucking day, and wilfully left me trapped in the clutches of that bloody maester. That, Lady Stark, is suspicious behaviour. What I didn’t work out for myself, Tyrion did.’

Arya stormed wordlessly away from him; her desperation almost making her weep.

‘Where are you going?’ Jaime demanded; coming after her.

‘To tell the captain to turn the ship around,’ Arya snapped.

‘No, you’re not,’ he declared.

‘Yes, I _am_ ,’ she seethed.

‘No, you’re _not_!’ Jaime growled; seizing her elbow and roughly yanking her around to face him.

Arya lashed out at him.

‘I don’t care who you are or what you know, Lannister, DO NOT TELL ME WHAT I MAY OR MAY NOT DO!’ she bellowed.

‘I’m NOT going to let you go and get yourself killed!’ Jaime thundered.

‘Well you’re just going to have to,’ Arya yelled, ‘I will not lose another person that I love; I won’t, I CAN’T!!!’

‘Isn’t that inconvenient?’ Jaime yelled back at her, ‘neither will I. What _will_ we do, I wonder?’

She folded her arms and turned resolutely away from him; biting on the tears that were desperately stinging her eyes, _why is this happening; WHY?_

‘What?’ Jaime retorted, ‘you choose _now_ to start acting like a fucking princess in a song? _Now?_ ’

‘Don’t you fucking dare!’ Arya growled.

‘I love you, young lady,’ Jaime snapped in reply, ‘don’t make me despise you.’

Arya snorted without replying, and Jaime demanded:

‘You wouldn’t despise _me_ , were I doing what you contemplate doing?’

‘Yes, but I would still love you.’

‘Because of it?’

‘In spite of it.’

‘Then we have that in common.’

For one, dangerous moment, the argument died out, and Arya could feel the space between them writhing in its own kind of agony as it begged to no longer exist; to be filled up as it had been in her freezing, draughty chamber at Dragonstone, when his skin had seared and burned and melted into hers in an excruciating beauty and pain that she had wanted to feel every day for the rest of her life.

‘So what should I do, according to you?’ Arya spat; returning to the safety of arguing with him, ‘go to my masters, beg for mercy and hope they’ll be accommodating? Oh no, wait! I could just ask you to spend your entire life in hiding; looking over your shoulder and running from your own shadow! What fool would _possibly_ say no to that?’

‘While your company _is_ charming, Lady Stark,’ Jaime smiled in reply; his lips curling beautifully upwards, ‘I’m afraid that’s not the only reason that the prospect appeals to me.’

The remark stung, but only long enough for realisation to replace the hurt with dread.

‘Jaime,’ Arya said; staring at him; ‘what have you done?’

Jaime gently cupped her chin and lifted it slightly; gazing with barely-concealed anger at the bruises on her face, and her breath caught in her throat as he drew close to her and kissed the worst of them; his lips brushing tenderly against each of the four angry welts that Aegon’s knuckles had left branded into her cheekbone.

‘Tonight,’ Jaime told her, his fingers ghosting soothingly over her bruised face and making her tremble, ‘I have been to ask the former King Aegon a few questions.’

‘ _About what?_ ’ Arya demanded; covering his hand with hers; unable to stop herself.

‘Dragonfire,’ Jaime replied; winding his fingers through hers; ‘articles of war. What right he thinks he has to lay so much as a finger on you –’

 ‘Oh no, Jaime –’

‘He _did_ try to answer me, but I couldn’t really hear him over the screaming –’

‘ _What in seven hells have you_ done _?_ ’

Jaime’s eyes were burning with the memory of blood ( _beautiful,_ Arya thought), and suspicion and anger made her heart thunder harder in her chest as she waited for him to answer her.

‘I only opened his stomach with the bluntest blade that I could find –’ he began.

‘ _Jaime!_ ’ Arya exclaimed.

‘– having so recently discovered how painful it can be, it only seemed right to profit from that knowledge –’

‘You weren’t _seen_?’

‘Of course I was seen. But he was screaming when I entered, and he was screaming when I left. It’ll be morning by the time Daenerys realises what’s happened.’

‘Daenerys will _kill_ you!’

‘Oh dear, what a shame. Looks like I’ll have to run away, then.’

Wrath, disbelief, annoyance and affection crashed together within her, and sent her reeling clumsily into the first words that she could coherently articulate:

‘I wanted him to die slowly, you fool!’ she shouted.

Jaime rolled his eyes at her.

‘He _will_ die slowly, with the size of the wound I – what do you mean, _you_ wanted him to die slowly? Are _you_ responsible for this infernal keening that’s been going on all day?’

‘Manticore venom on my fingernails,’ Arya told him; unable to keep the pride from her voice.

‘Thickened?’ Jaime asked.

‘Yes,’ she replied.

Jaime shrugged.

‘Looks like you’ll have to run away too, then.’

Arya hit him in the face.

‘You _idiot!_ ’ she screeched.

‘Nothing of the kind, Lady Stark,’ Jaime replied; looking far too pleased with himself to truly feel the blow, ‘I think it’s rather brilliant.’

‘Do you indeed, _Lord_ Lannister?’ Arya snapped, ‘and where do you suggest we run _to_ , now that we’re wanted in both Westeros and Essos, thanks to you?’

“We’ again, is it?’ Jaime purred.

She clouted him again; miserable and furious at him for this damning of himself; miserable and furious at herself for loving him for his stupidity.

Jaime, however, was neither miserable nor furious. In fact, he looked quite happy.

‘I suggest that we run somewhere they won’t find us,’ he remarked.

‘And _where_ in this miserable world could we go where the Faceless Men would not find us?’ Arya demanded, ‘ _where? Tell me_ , since you seem to know so much about it! Under a rock in Old Valyria? A reef at the bottom of the Jade Sea?’

‘Beyond the Wall,’ he said.

There was silence.

She had never even thought of it before now, probably because the idea was so absurd that it hardly merited consideration, but she thought about it now, as a former Faceless Man, and the very notion of having to track someone down in that wilderness made her shudder. But while one might be safe there from Faceless Men, one might die from a thousand other things. It was a land that _changed_ , and only those born there could presume to know it well enough not to be swallowed up by it.

‘It’s… cold beyond the Wall, Jaime,’ Arya stammered.

‘Really?’ Jaime laughed, ‘I had no idea.’

‘You _do_ have no idea,’ Arya insisted.

‘Have _you_ ever been beyond the Wall?’ Jaime demanded; beginning to sound angry.

‘No,’ Arya replied, ‘but the cold is in me. It’s been in my family for thousands of years. Southerners, on the other hand…Southerners don’t do well up there, and not only because of the cold.’

‘Is there something else to worry about besides the cold?’ Jaime snapped.

‘Let’s see,’ Arya snapped back, ‘you could get buried by an avalanche if you speak too loudly; fall into a ravine and break your neck if you put your foot in the wrong place; impaled on a glacier breaking apart; eaten by a shadow cat; squashed by a giant; gutted by wildlings or wights; taken by Others –’

Jaime snorted in laughter, and was rapidly silenced by the glare she gave him.

‘Seven gods, you’re serious,’ he said.

‘Beyond the Wall is hell,’ Arya told him, ‘hell, with ice. You might tolerate it at first, but eventually –’

‘You’d rather we both die than even take the chance?’ Jaime asked.

‘– eventually, you’ll hate it, and you’ll hate _me_ for ever allowing you to go there,’ Arya replied.

She drew breath to continue, and felt it slammed out of her by Jaime’s lips as they brushed softly against hers with a kind of gentle anger that she had never felt before; an indignation that only seemed to grow as he drew his arm around her waist, so that their bodies kissed like their mouths. The hot mystery of his tongue darted between her lips and coaxed them open; her fingers twined in his hair as her mouth sank into his mouth; his warmth; his light; and she was gasping in protest as he pulled away, and their foreheads kissed, and his breath once again became hers.

‘Hating you is impossible, and I believe you know that already,’ Jaime murmured.

Arya felt her fingers rising to cup his cheeks, and the anger going out of her; and along with her anger, her will to die; her will to be away from him.

‘They may still find us, sooner or later,’ she whispered; her lips aching to cross the two inches that separated them from his.

‘They’ll find us a lot later if we bribe the captain to take us to Eastwatch-by-the-Sea instead of Braavos,’ Jaime remarked; his hand still and warm in the small of her back.

‘We’d need a considerable bribe,’ Arya pointed out.

‘I brought a considerable amount of gold,’ Jaime declared; his eyes narrowing playfully, ‘now come _on_ , Lady Stark. Tell me you’re not tempted by the idea. Thousands of miles away from this fucking mess; these fucking people; with no rules and no obligations except the ones we create for ourselves. All we need do is run, and live.’

When she didn’t reply, he released her, and slowly circled her body like the needle of a compass until his chest was resting against her back; his chin nestling in the crook of her shoulder; his arms gentle around her waist; his hand pressing firmly against her stomach.

It was like sleeping in his lifeblood as it surged into his heart.

‘Tell me,’ Jaime said; his lips brushing her ear; ‘that you’re not thrilled by the prospect of our being able to spar all day if we wanted to.’

‘I’d thrash you,’ Arya whispered.

‘I’d let you,’ Jaime murmured.

‘Liar,’ she accused; enclosing his hand in both of hers and gasping as Jaime’s lips fell open-mouthed on her neck and sent desire rippling through her like a naked flame.

‘And… the prospect of staying in bed all day if we wanted to?’ Jaime mumbled against her skin; his voice muffled as he trailed his lips down her neck.

‘That doesn’t appeal to me in the slightest,’ Arya breathlessly declared.

‘You’re lying,’ Jaime declared in his turn; his fingers tiptoeing mischievously up across her stomach.

‘Are you calling me a liar?’ Arya asked; breathing hard as his thumb brushed slowly against her right breast.

‘Yes,’ Jaime whispered; kissing the nape of her neck and sighing against her as he felt her nipple harden between his fingers, ‘yes. Yes.’

Arya realised with some embarrassment that she was leaning heavily back against his cock that was grinding mercilessly into her buttocks and wantonly biting her lip as Jaime whispered against her neck; and she seized rapidly hold of his hand, and planted it firmly over her stomach again; straightening up, but not breaking away.

‘You’re a fool if you think you can seduce me into this,’ she said.

‘Am I?’ Jaime laughed, ‘it seemed to be working just fine.’

She squeezed his hand and looked over her shoulder at him. Jaime looked innocently back at her, and lightly kissed her nose and made her laugh, and when he laughed with her, it sounded like peace.

She was sorely tempted now, and the temptation was like a shining light. Jaime’s hand was in hers, and she knew that it belonged there. Beyond the Wall, her fingers could stay entwined with his. Beyond the Wall, no one could make her let him go again.

She stared at Jaime; alive, hers, alive, and she could tell from the impish grin on his face that he knew her mind already.

‘Fuck it,’ Arya said, ‘let’s run.’

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Valar morghulis, awesome people!
> 
> A huge, huge, gigantesque thank you to everyone who read, reviewed, favourited, followed, left kudos! Your enthusiasm is inspirational, and no Arya/Jaime awesomeness would be possible without it! It’s also something of a surprise that this story ended up with a happy ending, considering its more morbid elements. I put that down entirely to the influence of those who reviewed, and ‘tempered the darkness’ somewhat in doing so. :-D
> 
> To finish, here’s a little note on future projects for those who might be interested.
> 
> On 1st May, I am moving to a new city and starting a new job that has about twice the number of hours that my present one has, so I will most likely confine myself to one shots and two shots (at haphazard and very weird intervals) until I’ve settled into some kind of routine and know how much I can write. Nevertheless, here’s what I have planned for the future, in no particular order.
> 
> Two sequels to Remain Nameless, the first a one shot, the second a short work with multiple chapters.
> 
> A series of one shots provisionally entitled The Kingslayers’ Daughter, bridging the gap between I Became the Daughter and the Son and its sequel, whose planning is causing me nothing but grief at present (the narrative is far too big for me to support, so I probably won’t start the actual thing until I’m 100% sure that I have the skill to do it).
> 
> A whole load of Arya/Jaime one shots that I’ve been wanting to attempt for an absolute age, including a modern AU (been wanting to try one of those for a while) and a ‘put Arya and Jaime together in a confined space post-Red Wedding and see what happens’ fic.
> 
> A new Arya/Jaime long fic set during the Long Night.
> 
> That’s all from me, dearies! Thanks for being awesome!


End file.
